UniverSLU: Universal Spoken Language Understanding for Diverse Tasks with Natural Language Instructions

Siddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Jee-weon Jung, Yifan Peng, Roshan Sharma, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe


Abstract
Recent studies leverage large language models with multi-tasking capabilities, using natural language prompts to guide the model’s behavior and surpassing performance of task-specific models. Motivated by this, we ask: can we build a single model that jointly performs various spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks? We start by adapting a pre-trained automatic speech recognition model to additional tasks using single-token task specifiers. We enhance this approach through instruction tuning, i.e., finetuning by describing the task using natural language instructions followed by the list of label options. Our approach can generalize to new task descriptions for the seen tasks during inference, thereby enhancing its user-friendliness. We demonstrate the efficacy of our single multi-task learning model “UniverSLU” for 12 speech classification and sequence generation task types spanning 17 datasets and 9 languages. On most tasks, UniverSLU achieves competitive performance and often even surpasses task-specific models. Additionally, we assess the zero-shot capabilities, finding that the model generalizes to new datasets and languages for seen task types.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.151
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2754–2774
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.151
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.151
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siddhant Arora, Hayato Futami, Jee-weon Jung, Yifan Peng, Roshan Sharma, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, Karen Livescu, and Shinji Watanabe. 2024. UniverSLU: Universal Spoken Language Understanding for Diverse Tasks with Natural Language Instructions. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2754–2774, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UniverSLU: Universal Spoken Language Understanding for Diverse Tasks with Natural Language Instructions (Arora et al., NAACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.151.pdf