Markus Boese


2022

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LINGUIST: Language Model Instruction Tuning to Generate Annotated Utterances for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging
Andy Rosenbaum | Saleh Soltan | Wael Hamza | Yannick Versley | Markus Boese
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We present LINGUIST, a method for generating annotated data for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (IC+ST), via fine-tuning AlexaTM 5B, a 5-billion-parameter multilingual sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, on a flexible instruction prompt. In a 10-shot novel intent setting for the SNIPS dataset, LINGUIST surpasses state-of-the-art approaches (Back-Translation and Example Extrapolation) by a wide margin, showing absolute improvement for the target intents of +1.9 points on IC Recall and +2.5 points on ST F1 Score. In the zero-shot cross-lingual setting of the mATIS++ dataset, LINGUIST out-performs a strong baseline of Machine Translation with Slot Alignment by +4.14 points absolute on ST F1 Score across 6 languages, while matching performance on IC. Finally, we verify our results on an internal large-scale multilingual dataset for conversational agent IC+ST and show significant improvements over a baseline which uses Back-Translation, Paraphrasing and Slot Catalog Resampling. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate instruction fine-tuning of a large-scale seq2seq model to control the outputs of multilingual intent- and slot-labeled data generation.

2020

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Leveraging User Paraphrasing Behavior In Dialog Systems To Automatically Collect Annotations For Long-Tail Utterances
Tobias Falke | Markus Boese | Daniil Sorokin | Caglar Tirkaz | Patrick Lehnen
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track

In large-scale commercial dialog systems, users express the same request in a wide variety of alternative ways with a long tail of less frequent alternatives. Handling the full range of this distribution is challenging, in particular when relying on manual annotations. However, the same users also provide useful implicit feedback as they often paraphrase an utterance if the dialog system failed to understand it. We propose MARUPA, a method to leverage this type of feedback by creating annotated training examples from it. MARUPA creates new data in a fully automatic way, without manual intervention or effort from annotators, and specifically for currently failing utterances. By re-training the dialog system on this new data, accuracy and coverage for long-tail utterances can be improved. In experiments, we study the effectiveness of this approach in a commercial dialog system across various domains and three languages.