Pre-trained encoder-only and sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models each have advantages, however training both model types from scratch is computationally expensive. We explore recipes to improve pre-training efficiency by initializing one model from the other. (1) Extracting the encoder from a seq2seq model, we show it under-performs a Masked Language Modeling (MLM) encoder, particularly on sequence labeling tasks. Variations of masking during seq2seq training, reducing the decoder size, and continuing with a small amount of MLM training do not close the gap. (2) Conversely, using an encoder to warm-start seq2seq training, we show that by unfreezing the encoder partway through training, we can match task performance of a from-scratch seq2seq model. Overall, this two-stage approach is an efficient recipe to obtain both a multilingual encoder and a seq2seq model, matching the performance of training each model from scratch while reducing the total compute cost by 27%.

Semantic parsing plays a key role in digital voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant by mapping natural language to structured meaning representations. When we want to improve the capabilities of a voice assistant by adding a new domain, the underlying semantic parsing model needs to be retrained using thousands of annotated examples from the new domain, which is time-consuming and expensive. In this work, we present an architecture to perform such domain adaptation automatically, with only a small amount of metadata about the new domain and without any new training data (zero-shot) or with very few examples (few-shot). We use a base seq2seq (sequence-to-sequence) architecture and augment it with a concept encoder that encodes intent and slot tags from the new domain. We also introduce a novel decoder-focused approach to pretrain seq2seq models to be concept aware using Wikidata and use it to help our model learn important concepts and perform well in low-resource settings. We report few-shot and zero-shot results for compositional semantic parsing on the TOPv2 dataset and show that our model outperforms prior approaches in few-shot settings for the TOPv2 and SNIPS datasets.

Use of synthetic data is rapidly emerging as a realistic alternative to manually annotating live traffic for industry-scale model building. Manual data annotation is slow, expensive and not preferred for meeting customer privacy expectations. Further, commercial natural language applications are required to support continuously evolving features as well as newly added experiences. To address these requirements, we propose a targeted synthetic data generation technique by inserting tokens into a given semantic signature. The generated data are used as additional training samples in the tasks of intent classification and named entity recognition. We evaluate on a real-world voice assistant dataset, and using only 33% of the available training set, we achieve the same accuracy as training with all available data. Further, we analyze the effects of data generation across varied real-world applications and propose heuristics that improve the task performance further.

We present a hybrid approach for product review summarization which consists of: (i) an unsupervised extractive step to extract the most important sentences out of all the reviews, and (ii) a supervised abstractive step to summarize the extracted sentences into a coherent short summary. This approach allows us to develop an efficient cross-lingual abstractive summarizer that can generate summaries in any language, given the extracted sentences out of thousands of reviews in a source language. In order to train and test the abstractive model, we create the Cross-lingual Amazon Reviews Summarization (CARS) dataset which provides English summaries for training, and English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Hindi summaries for testing based on selected English reviews. We show that the summaries generated by our model are as good as human written summaries in coherence, informativeness, non-redundancy, and fluency.

Understanding human language often necessitates understanding entities and their place in a taxonomy of knowledge—their types.Previous methods to learn entity types rely on training classifiers on datasets with coarse, noisy, and incomplete labels. We introduce a method to instill fine-grained type knowledge in language models with text-to-text pre-training on type-centric questions leveraging knowledge base documents and knowledge graphs.We create the WikiWiki dataset: entities and passages from 10M Wikipedia articles linked to the Wikidata knowledge graph with 41K types.Models trained on WikiWiki achieve state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot dialog state tracking benchmarks, accurately infer entity types in Wikipedia articles, and can discover new types deemed useful by human judges.

Fine-tuning a pre-trained language model using annotated data has become the de-facto standard for adapting general-purpose pre-trained models like BERT to downstream tasks. However, given the trend of larger pre-trained models, fine-tuning these models for each downstream task is parameter-inefficient and computationally-expensive deeming this approach sub-optimal for adoption by NLU systems. In recent years, various approaches have been proposed for parameter efficient task adaptation such as Adaptor, Bitfit, Prompt tuning, Prefix tuning etc. However, most of these efforts propose to insert task specific parameters in-between or inside intermediate layers of the pre-trained encoder resulting in higher computational cost due to back-propagation of errors to all layers. To mitigate this issue, we propose a light but efficient, attention based fusion module which computes task-attuned token representations by aggregating intermediate layer representations from a pre-trained network. Our proposed fusion module trains only 0.0009% of total parameters and achieves competitive performance to the standard fine-tuning approach on various tasks. It is also decoupled from the pre-trained network making it efficient during computation and scalable during deployment. Last but not the least, we demonstrate that our proposed attention-fusion mechanism can transfer effectively to different languages for further re-use and expansion.

A bottleneck to developing Semantic Parsing (SP) models is the need for a large volume of human-labeled training data. Given the complexity and cost of human annotation for SP, labeled data is often scarce, particularly in multilingual settings. Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at SP given only a few examples, however LLMs are unsuitable for runtime systems which require low latency. In this work, we propose CLASP, a simple method to improve low-resource SP for moderate-sized models: we generate synthetic data from AlexaTM 20B to augment the training set for a model 40x smaller (500M parameters). We evaluate on two datasets in low-resource settings: English PIZZA, containing either 348 or 16 real examples, and mTOP cross-lingual zero-shot, where training data is available only in English, and the model must generalize to four new languages. On both datasets, we show significant improvements over strong baseline methods.

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.

In commercial dialogue systems, the Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) component tends to have numerous domains thus context is needed to help resolve ambiguities. Previous works that incorporate context for SLU have mostly focused on domains where context is limited to a few minutes. However, there are domains that have related context that could span up to hours and days. In this paper, we propose temporal representations that combine wall-clock second difference and turn order offset information to utilize both recent and distant context in a novel large-scale setup. Experiments on the Contextual Domain Classification (CDC) task with various encoder architectures show that temporal representations combining both information outperforms only one of the two. We further demonstrate that our contextual Transformer is able to reduce 13.04% of classification errors compared to a non-contextual baseline. We also conduct empirical analyses to study recent versus distant context and opportunities to lower deployment costs.

Pretrained transformer-based encoders such as BERT have been demonstrated to achieve state-of-the-art performance on numerous NLP tasks. Despite their success, BERT style encoders are large in size and have high latency during inference (especially on CPU machines) which make them unappealing for many online applications. Recently introduced compression and distillation methods have provided effective ways to alleviate this shortcoming. However, the focus of these works has been mainly on monolingual encoders. Motivated by recent successes in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning using multilingual pretrained encoders such as mBERT, we evaluate the effectiveness of Knowledge Distillation (KD) both during pretraining stage and during fine-tuning stage on multilingual BERT models. We demonstrate that in contradiction to the previous observation in the case of monolingual distillation, in multilingual settings, distillation during pretraining is more effective than distillation during fine-tuning for zero-shot transfer learning. Moreover, we observe that distillation during fine-tuning may hurt zero-shot cross-lingual performance. Finally, we demonstrate that distilling a larger model (BERT Large) results in the strongest distilled model that performs best both on the source language as well as target languages in zero-shot settings.

Dialog State Tracking (DST), an integral part of modern dialog systems, aims to track user preferences and constraints (slots) in task-oriented dialogs. In real-world settings with constantly changing services, DST systems must generalize to new domains and unseen slot types. Existing methods for DST do not generalize well to new slot names and many require known ontologies of slot types and values for inference. We introduce a novel ontology-free framework that supports natural language queries for unseen constraints and slots in multi-domain task-oriented dialogs. Our approach is based on generative question-answering using a conditional language model pre-trained on substantive English sentences. Our model improves joint goal accuracy in zero-shot domain adaptation settings by up to 9% (absolute) over the previous state-of-the-art on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset.

We present a neural model for paraphrasing and train it to generate delexicalized sentences. We achieve this by creating training data in which each input is paired with a number of reference paraphrases. These sets of reference paraphrases represent a weak type of semantic equivalence based on annotated slots and intents. To understand semantics from different types of slots, other than anonymizing slots, we apply convolutional neural networks (CNN) prior to pooling on slot values and use pointers to locate slots in the output. We show empirically that the generated paraphrases are of high quality, leading to an additional 1.29% exact match on live utterances. We also show that natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, such as intent classification and named entity recognition, can benefit from data augmentation using automatically generated paraphrases.

Currently, in spoken language understanding (SLU) systems, the automatic speech recognition (ASR) module produces multiple interpretations (or hypotheses) for the input audio signal and the natural language understanding (NLU) module takes the one with the highest confidence score for domain or intent classification. However, the interpretations can be noisy, and solely relying on one interpretation can cause information loss. To address the problem, many research works attempt to rerank the interpretations for a better choice while some recent works get better performance by integrating all the hypotheses during prediction. In this paper, we follow the way of integrating hypotheses but strengthen the training mode by involving more tasks, some of which may be not in existing tasks of NLU but relevant, via multi-task learning or transfer learning. Moreover, we propose the Hierarchical Attention Mechanism (HAM) to further improve the performance with the acoustic-model features like confidence scores, which are ignored in the current hypotheses integration models. The experimental results show that compared to the standard estimation with one hypothesis, the multi-task learning with HAM can improve the domain and intent classification by relatively 19% and 37%, which are much higher than improvements with current integration or reranking methods. To illustrate the cause of improvements brought by our model, we decode the hidden representations of some utterance examples and compare the generated texts with hypotheses and transcripts. The comparison shows that our model could recover the transcription by integrating the fragmented information among hypotheses and identifying the frequent error patterns of the ASR module, and even rewrite the query for a better understanding, which reveals the characteristic of multi-task learning of broadcasting knowledge.

Semantic parsing is one of the key components of natural language understanding systems. A successful parse transforms an input utterance to an action that is easily understood by the system. Many algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem, from conventional rule-based or statistical slot-filling systems to shift-reduce based neural parsers. For complex parsing tasks, the state-of-the-art method is based on an autoregressive sequence to sequence model that generates the parse directly. This model is slow at inference time, generating parses in O(n) decoding steps (n is the length of the target sequence). In addition, we demonstrate that this method performs poorly in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning settings. In this paper, we propose a non-autoregressive parser which is based on the insertion transformer to overcome these two issues. Our approach 1) speeds up decoding by 3x while outperforming the autoregressive model and 2) significantly improves cross-lingual transfer in the low-resource setting by 37% compared to autoregressive baseline. We test our approach on three wellknown monolingual datasets: ATIS, SNIPS and TOP. For cross-lingual semantic parsing, we use the MultiATIS++ and the multilingual TOP datasets.

The task of natural question generation is to generate a corresponding question given the input passage (fact) and answer. It is useful for enlarging the training set of QA systems. Previous work has adopted sequence-to-sequence models that take a passage with an additional bit to indicate answer position as input. However, they do not explicitly model the information between answer and other context within the passage. We propose a model that matches the answer with the passage before generating the question. Experiments show that our model outperforms the existing state of the art using rich features.

We propose an entity-centric neural crosslingual coreference model that builds on multi-lingual embeddings and language independent features. We perform both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations of our model. In the intrinsic evaluation, we show that our model, when trained on English and tested on Chinese and Spanish, achieves competitive results to the models trained directly on Chinese and Spanish respectively. In the extrinsic evaluation, we show that our English model helps achieve superior entity linking accuracy on Chinese and Spanish test sets than the top 2015 TAC system without using any annotated data from Chinese or Spanish.