Shayna Gardiner


2024

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Data Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Large Language Model Fine-Tuning on Call Transcripts
Shayna Gardiner | Tania Habib | Kevin Humphreys | Masha Azizi | Frederic Mailhot | Anne Paling | Preston Thomas | Nathan Zhang
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization (CALD-pseudo 2024)

Large language models in public-facing industrial applications must accurately process data for the domain in which they are deployed, but they must not leak sensitive or confidential information when used. We present a process for anonymizing training data, a framework for quantitatively and qualitatively assessing the effectiveness of this process, and an assessment of the effectiveness of models fine-tuned on anonymized data in comparison with commercially available LLM APIs.

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Resolving Transcription Ambiguity in Spanish: A Hybrid Acoustic-Lexical System for Punctuation Restoration
Xiliang Zhu | Chia-Tien Chang | Shayna Gardiner | David Rossouw | Jonas Robertson
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language

Punctuation restoration is a crucial step after Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to enhance transcript readability and facilitate subsequent NLP tasks. Nevertheless, conventional lexical-based approaches are inadequate for solving the punctuation restoration task in Spanish, where ambiguity can be often found between unpunctuated declaratives and questions. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid acoustic-lexical punctuation restoration system for Spanish transcription, which consolidates acoustic and lexical signals through a modular process. Our experiment results show that the proposed system can effectively improve F1 score of question marks and overall punctuation restoration on both public and internal Spanish conversational datasets. Additionally, benchmark comparison against LLMs (Large Language Model) indicates the superiority of our approach in accuracy, reliability and latency. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the Word Error Rate (WER) of the ASR module also benefits from our proposed system.

2022

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Punctuation Restoration in Spanish Customer Support Transcripts using Transfer Learning
Xiliang Zhu | Shayna Gardiner | David Rossouw | Tere Roldán | Simon Corston-Oliver
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems typically produce unpunctuated transcripts that have poor readability. In addition, building a punctuation restoration system is challenging for low-resource languages, especially for domain-specific applications. In this paper, we propose a Spanish punctuation restoration system designed for a real-time customer support transcription service. To address the data sparsity of Spanish transcripts in the customer support domain, we introduce two transferlearning-based strategies: 1) domain adaptation using out-of-domain Spanish text data; 2) crosslingual transfer learning leveraging in-domain English transcript data. Our experiment results show that these strategies improve the accuracy of the Spanish punctuation restoration system.

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Developing a Production System for Purpose of Call Detection in Business Phone Conversations
Elena Khasanova | Pooja Hiranandani | Shayna Gardiner | Cheng Chen | Simon Corston-Oliver | Xue-Yong Fu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Track

For agents at a contact centre receiving calls, the most important piece of information is the reason for a given call. An agent cannot provide support on a call if they do not know why a customer is calling. In this paper we describe our implementation of a commercial system to detect Purpose of Call statements in English business call transcripts in real time. We present a detailed analysis of types of Purpose of Call statements and language patterns related to them, discuss an approach to collect rich training data by bootstrapping from a set of rules to a neural model, and describe a hybrid model which consists of a transformer-based classifier and a set of rules by leveraging insights from the analysis of call transcripts. The model achieved 88.6 F1 on average in various types of business calls when tested on real life data and has low inference time. We reflect on the challenges and design decisions when developing and deploying the system.

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Entity-level Sentiment Analysis in Contact Center Telephone Conversations
Xue-yong Fu | Cheng Chen | Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar | Shayna Gardiner | Pooja Hiranandani | Shashi Bhushan Tn
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Entity-level sentiment analysis predicts the sentiment about entities mentioned in a given text. It is very useful in a business context to understand user emotions towards certain entities, such as products or companies. In this paper, we demonstrate how we developed an entity-level sentiment analysis system that analyzes English telephone conversation transcripts in contact centers to provide business insight. We present two approaches, one entirely based on the transformer-based DistilBERT model, and another that uses a neural network supplemented with some heuristic rules.