Skill routing is an important component in large-scale conversational systems. In contrast to traditional rule-based skill routing, state-of-the-art systems use a model-based approach to enable natural conversations. To provide supervision signal required to train such models, ideas such as human annotation, replication of a rule-based system, relabeling based on user paraphrases, and bandit-based learning were suggested. However, these approaches: (a) do not scale in terms of the number of skills and skill on-boarding, (b) require a very costly expert annotation/rule-design, (c) introduce risks in the user experience with each model update. In this paper, we present a scalable self-learning approach to explore routing alternatives without causing abrupt policy changes that break the user experience, learn from the user interaction, and incrementally improve the routing via frequent model refreshes. To enable such robust frequent model updates, we suggest a simple and effective approach that ensures controlled policy updates for individual domains, followed by an off-policy evaluation for making deployment decisions without any need for lengthy A/B experimentation. We conduct various offline and online A/B experiments on a commercial large-scale conversational system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in real-world production settings.

In recent years, we have seen an increasing amount of interest in low-dimensional vector representations of words. Among other things, these facilitate computing word similarity and relatedness scores. The most well-known example of algorithms to produce representations of this sort are the word2vec approaches. In this paper, we investigate a new model to induce such vector spaces for medical concepts, based on a joint objective that exploits not only word co-occurrences but also manually labeled documents, as available from sources such as PubMed. Our extensive experimental analysis shows that our embeddings lead to significantly higher correlations with human similarity and relatedness assessments than previous work. Due to the simplicity and versatility of vector representations, these findings suggest that our resource can easily be used as a drop-in replacement to improve any systems relying on medical concept similarity measures.

Traditional machine translation systems often require heavy feature engineering and the combination of multiple techniques for solving different subproblems. In recent years, several end-to-end learning architectures based on recurrent neural networks have been proposed. Unlike traditional systems, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems learn the parameters of the model and require only minimal preprocessing. Memory and time constraints allow to take only a fixed number of words into account, which leads to the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. In this work, we analyze why the OOV problem arises and why it is considered a serious problem in German. We study the effectiveness of compound word splitters for alleviating the OOV problem, resulting in a 2.5+ BLEU points improvement over a baseline on the WMT’14 German-to-English translation task. For English-to-German translation, we use target-side compound splitting through a special syntax during training that allows the model to merge compound words and gain 0.2 BLEU points.