A Hybrid Approach to Scalable and Robust Spoken Language Understanding in Enterprise Virtual Agents

Ryan Price, Mahnoosh Mehrabani, Narendra Gupta, Yeon-Jun Kim, Shahab Jalalvand, Minhua Chen, Yanjie Zhao, Srinivas Bangalore


Abstract
Spoken language understanding (SLU) extracts the intended mean- ing from a user utterance and is a critical component of conversational virtual agents. In enterprise virtual agents (EVAs), language understanding is substantially challenging. First, the users are infrequent callers who are unfamiliar with the expectations of a pre-designed conversation flow. Second, the users are paying customers of an enterprise who demand a reliable, consistent and efficient user experience when resolving their issues. In this work, we describe a general and robust framework for intent and entity extraction utilizing a hybrid of statistical and rule-based approaches. Our framework includes confidence modeling that incorporates information from all components in the SLU pipeline, a critical addition for EVAs to en- sure accuracy. Our focus is on creating accurate and scalable SLU that can be deployed rapidly for a large class of EVA applications with little need for human intervention.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-industry.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Young-bum Kim, Yunyao Li, Owen Rambow
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
63–71
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-industry.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-industry.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ryan Price, Mahnoosh Mehrabani, Narendra Gupta, Yeon-Jun Kim, Shahab Jalalvand, Minhua Chen, Yanjie Zhao, and Srinivas Bangalore. 2021. A Hybrid Approach to Scalable and Robust Spoken Language Understanding in Enterprise Virtual Agents. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers, pages 63–71, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Hybrid Approach to Scalable and Robust Spoken Language Understanding in Enterprise Virtual Agents (Price et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-industry.9.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-industry.9.mp4