Bootstrapping Multilingual Intent Models via Machine Translation for Dialog Automation

Nicholas Ruiz, Srinivas Bangalore, John Chen


Abstract
With the resurgence of chat-based dialog systems in consumer and enterprise applications, there has been much success in developing data-driven and rule-based natural language models to understand human intent. Since these models require large amounts of data and in-domain knowledge, expanding an equivalent service into new markets is disrupted by language barriers that inhibit dialog automation. This paper presents a user study to evaluate the utility of out-of-the-box machine translation technology to (1) rapidly bootstrap multilingual spoken dialog systems and (2) enable existing human analysts to understand foreign language utterances. We additionally evaluate the utility of machine translation in human assisted environments, where a portion of the traffic is processed by analysts. In English→Spanish experiments, we observe a high potential for dialog automation, as well as the potential for human analysts to process foreign language utterances with high accuracy.
Anthology ID:
2018.eamt-main.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation
Month:
May
Year:
2018
Address:
Alicante, Spain
Editors:
Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz, Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Maja Popović, Celia Rico, André Martins, Joachim Van den Bogaert, Mikel L. Forcada
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
323–328
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2018.eamt-main.32
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nicholas Ruiz, Srinivas Bangalore, and John Chen. 2018. Bootstrapping Multilingual Intent Models via Machine Translation for Dialog Automation. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, pages 323–328, Alicante, Spain.
Cite (Informal):
Bootstrapping Multilingual Intent Models via Machine Translation for Dialog Automation (Ruiz et al., EAMT 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2018.eamt-main.32.pdf