Practical Application of Domain Dependent Confidence Measurement for Spoken Language Understanding Systems

Mahnoosh Mehrabani, David Thomson, Benjamin Stern


Abstract
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), which extracts semantic information from speech, is not flawless, specially in practical applications. The reliability of the output of an SLU system can be evaluated using a semantic confidence measure. Confidence measures are a solution to improve the quality of spoken dialogue systems, by rejecting low-confidence SLU results. In this study we discuss real-world applications of confidence scoring in a customer service scenario. We build confidence models for three major types of dialogue states that are considered as different domains: how may I help you, number capture, and confirmation. Practical challenges to train domain-dependent confidence models, including data limitations, are discussed, and it is shown that feature engineering plays an important role to improve performance. We explore a wide variety of predictor features based on speech recognition, intent classification, and high-level domain knowledge, and find the combined feature set with the best rejection performance for each application.
Anthology ID:
N18-3023
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 3 (Industry Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans - Louisiana
Editors:
Srinivas Bangalore, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, Yunyao Li
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
185–192
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-3023
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-3023
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mahnoosh Mehrabani, David Thomson, and Benjamin Stern. 2018. Practical Application of Domain Dependent Confidence Measurement for Spoken Language Understanding Systems. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 3 (Industry Papers), pages 185–192, New Orleans - Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Practical Application of Domain Dependent Confidence Measurement for Spoken Language Understanding Systems (Mehrabani et al., NAACL 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-3023.pdf