Bojia Lin


2021

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Language Scaling for Universal Suggested Replies Model
Qianlan Ying | Payal Bajaj | Budhaditya Deb | Yu Yang | Wei Wang | Bojia Lin | Milad Shokouhi | Xia Song | Yang Yang | Daxin Jiang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers

We consider the problem of scaling automated suggested replies for a commercial email application to multiple languages. Faced with increased compute requirements and low language resources for language expansion, we build a single universal model for improving the quality and reducing run-time costs of our production system. However, restricted data movement across regional centers prevents joint training across languages. To this end, we propose a multi-lingual multi-task continual learning framework, with auxiliary tasks and language adapters to train universal language representation across regions. The experimental results show positive cross-lingual transfer across languages while reducing catastrophic forgetting across regions. Our online results on real user traffic show significant CTR and Char-saved gain as well as 65% training cost reduction compared with per-language models. As a consequence, we have scaled the feature in multiple languages including low-resource markets.