Model churn occurs when re-training a model yields different predictions despite using the same data and hyper-parameters. Churn reduction is crucial for industry conversational systems where users expect consistent results for the same queries. In this setting, compute resources are often limited due to latency requirements during serving and overall time constraints during re-training. To address this issue, we propose a compute-efficient method that mitigates churn without requiring extra resources for training or inference. Our approach involves a lightweight data pre-processing step that pairs semantic parses based on their “function call signature” and encourages similarity through an additional loss based on Jensen-Shannon Divergence. We validate the effectiveness of our method in three scenarios: academic (+3.93 percent improvement on average in a churn reduction metric), simulated noisy data (+8.09), and industry (+5.28) settings.

This paper presents the system developed by our team for Semeval 2021 Task 4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning. The aim of the task was to benchmark the NLP techniques in understanding the abstract concepts present in a passage, and then predict the missing word in a human written summary of the passage. We trained a Roberta-Large model trained with a masked language modeling objective. In cases where this model failed to predict one of the available options, another Roberta-Large model trained as a binary classifier was used to predict correct and incorrect options. We used passage summary generated by Pegasus model and question as inputs. Our best solution was an ensemble of these 2 systems. We achieved an accuracy of 86.22% on subtask 1 and 87.10% on subtask 2.