E2E Spoken Entity Extraction for Virtual Agents

Karan Singla, Yeon-Jun Kim, Srinivas Bangalore


Abstract
In human-computer conversations, extracting entities such as names, street addresses and email addresses from speech is a challenging task. In this paper, we study the impact of fine-tuning pre-trained speech encoders on extracting spoken entities in human-readable form directly from speech without the need for text transcription. We illustrate that such a direct approach optimizes the encoder to transcribe only the entity relevant portions of speech ignoring the superfluous portions such as carrier phrases, or spell name entities. In the context of dialog from an enterprise virtual agent, we demonstrate that the 1-step approach outperforms the typical 2-step approach which first generates lexical transcriptions followed by text-based entity extraction for identifying spoken entities.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-industry.54
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Mingxuan Wang, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
567–574
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-industry.54
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-industry.54
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karan Singla, Yeon-Jun Kim, and Srinivas Bangalore. 2023. E2E Spoken Entity Extraction for Virtual Agents. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 567–574, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
E2E Spoken Entity Extraction for Virtual Agents (Singla et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-industry.54.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-industry.54.mp4