The growing popularity of conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri rely on accurate spoken language comprehension. The query reformulation (QR) method, which reformulates defective user queries, has been broadly adopted to mitigate the challenges posed by understanding user’s intent from imperfect spoken recognition result. However, due to the scarcity of non-English QR labels, providing high-quality QR for non-English users still remains a challenge. This work proposes a novel cross-lingual QR framework, CL-QR, to leverage the abundant reformulation resources in English to improve non-English QR performance. The proposed work also proposes a Module-wise Mutually-supervised Feedback learning (MMF) algorithm to enable the continually self-improving of the CL-QR, which alleviates the lack of cross-lingual QR training data and enhances the delivery of high-quality reformulations learned in English for multilingual queries. Both offline evaluation and online A/B testing demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Contextual query rewriting (CQR) is a crucial component in Conversational AI agents, leveraging the contextual information from previous user-agent conversations to improve the comprehension of current user intent. However, traditional CQR methods often concentrate on supervised fine-tuning only, neglecting the opportunities to learn from user feedback to align with user preferences. Inspired by recent advances in learning from human feedback (LHF), this paper proposes a novel Preference Aligned Contextual Query Rewriting (PA-CQR) framework to enhance the CQR model’s capability in generating user preference-aligned rewrites. This paper also investigates the efficacy of various state-of-the-art feedback learning algorithms on the CQR task, and proposes a novel Dynamic Direct Preference Optimization (Dynamic DPO) algorithm to better adapt the DPO algorithm to large-scale CQR training. Experiments on large-scale real-world CQR data set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PA-CQR framework and the Dynamic DPO.

A Personalized Query Rewriting system strives to minimize defective queries to ensure robust conversational functionality by considering individual user behavior and preferences. It’s designed as a search-based system, maintaining a user index of past successful interactions with the conversational AI. However, this method faces challenges with unseen interactions, which refers to novel user interactions not covered by the user’s historical index. This paper introduces our Collaborative Query Rewriting approach, which utilizes underlying topological information to assist in rewriting defective queries arising from unseen user interactions. This approach begins by constructing a “User Feedback Interaction Graph” (FIG) using historical user-entity interactions. Subsequently, we traverse through the graph edges to establish an enhanced user index, referred to as the “collaborative user index”. This paper then further explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in conjunction with graph traversal, leading to a significant increase in index coverage for unseen interactions. The effectiveness of our proposed approach has been proven through experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset and online A/B experiments.

Query rewriting (QR) is an important technique for user friction (i.e. recovering ASR error or system error) reduction and contextual carryover (i.e. ellipsis and co-reference) in conversational AI systems. Recently, generation-based QR models have achieved promising results on these two tasks separately. Although these two tasks have many similarities such as they both use the previous dialogue along with the current request as model input, there is no unified model to solve them jointly. To this end, we propose a unified contextual query rewriting model that unifies QR for both reducing friction and contextual carryover purpose. Moreover, we involve multiple auxiliary tasks such as trigger prediction and NLU interpretation tasks to boost the performance of the rewrite. We leverage the text-to-text unified framework which uses independent tasks with weighted loss to account for task importance. Then we propose new unified multitask learning strategies including a sequential model which outputs one sentence for multi-tasks, and a hybrid model where some tasks are independent and some tasks are sequentially generated. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed unified learning methods.

Conversational understanding is an integral part of modern intelligent devices. In a large fraction of the global traffic from customers using smart digital assistants, frictions in dialogues may be attributed to incorrect understanding of the entities in a customer’s query due to factors including ambiguous mentions, mispronunciation, background noise and faulty on-device signal processing. Such errors are compounded by two common deficiencies from intelligent devices namely, (1) the device not being tailored to individual customers, and (2) the device responses being unaware of the context in the conversation session. Viewing this problem via the lens of retrieval-based search engines, we build and evaluate a scalable entity correction system, PENTATRON. The system leverages a parametric transformer-based language model to learn patterns from in-session customer-device interactions coupled with a non-parametric personalized entity index to compute the correct query, which aids downstream components in reasoning about the best response. In addition to establishing baselines and demonstrating the value of personalized and context-aware systems, we use multitasking to learn the domain of the correct entity. We also investigate the utility of language model prompts. Through extensive experiments, we show a significant upward movement of the key metric (Exact Match) by up to 500.97% (relative to the baseline).

Unexpected responses or repeated clarification questions from conversational agents detract from the users’ experience with technology meant to streamline their daily tasks. To reduce these frictions, Query Rewriting (QR) techniques replace transcripts of faulty queries with alternatives that lead to responses thatsatisfy the users’ needs. Despite their successes, existing QR approaches are limited in their ability to fix queries that require considering users’ personal preferences. We improve QR by proposing Personalized Adaptive Interactions Graph Encoder (PAIGE).PAIGE is the first QR architecture that jointly models user’s affinities and query semantics end-to-end. The core idea is to represent previous user-agent interactions and world knowledge in a structured form — a heterogeneous graph — and apply message passing to propagate latent representations of users’ affinities to refine utterance embeddings.Using these embeddings, PAIGE can potentially provide different rewrites given the same query for users with different preferences. Our model, trained without any human-annotated data, improves the rewrite retrieval precision of state-of-the-art baselines by 12.5–17.5% while having nearly ten times fewer parameters.

In conversational AI agents, Query Rewriting (QR) plays a crucial role in reducing user frictions and satisfying their daily demands. User frictions are caused by various reasons, such as errors in the conversational AI system, users’ accent or their abridged language. In this work, we present a novel Constrained Generation Framework (CGF) for query rewriting at both global and personalized levels. It is based on the encoder-decoder framework, where the encoder takes the query and its previous dialogue turns as the input to form a context-enhanced representation, and the decoder uses constrained decoding to generate the rewrites based on the pre-defined global or personalized constrained decoding space. Extensive offline and online A/B experiments show that the proposed CGF significantly boosts the query rewriting performance.

Query rewrite (QR) is an emerging component in conversational AI systems, reducing user defect. User defect is caused by various reasons, such as errors in the spoken dialogue system, users’ slips of the tongue or their abridged language. Many of the user defects stem from personalized factors, such as user’s speech pattern, dialect, or preferences. In this work, we propose a personalized search-based QR framework, which focuses on automatic reduction of user defect. We build a personalized index for each user, which encompasses diverse affinity layers to reflect personal preferences for each user in the conversational AI. Our personalized QR system contains retrieval and ranking layers. Supported by user feedback based learning, training our models does not require hand-annotated data. Experiments on personalized test set showed that our personalized QR system is able to correct systematic and user errors by utilizing phonetic and semantic inputs.

For voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, correctly interpreting users’ intentions is of utmost importance. However, users sometimes experience friction with these assistants, caused by errors from different system components or user errors such as slips of the tongue. Users tend to rephrase their queries until they get a satisfactory response. Rephrase detection is used to identify the rephrases and has long been treated as a task with pairwise input, which does not fully utilize the contextual information (e.g. users’ implicit feedback). To this end, we propose a contextual rephrase detection model ContReph to automatically identify rephrases from multi-turn dialogues. We showcase how to leverage the dialogue context and user-agent interaction signals, including the user’s implicit feedback and the time gap between different turns, which can help significantly outperform the pairwise rephrase detection models.

Paraphrase generation is a longstanding NLP task that has diverse applications on downstream NLP tasks. However, the effectiveness of existing efforts predominantly relies on large amounts of golden labeled data. Though unsupervised endeavors have been proposed to alleviate this issue, they may fail to generate meaningful paraphrases due to the lack of supervision signals. In this work, we go beyond the existing paradigms and propose a novel approach to generate high-quality paraphrases with data of weak supervision. Specifically, we tackle the weakly-supervised paraphrase generation problem by: (1) obtaining abundant weakly-labeled parallel sentences via retrieval-based pseudo paraphrase expansion; and (2) developing a meta-learning framework to progressively select valuable samples for fine-tuning a pre-trained language model BART on the sentential paraphrasing task. We demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over existing unsupervised approaches, and is even comparable in performance with supervised state-of-the-arts.

The goal of semantic parsing is to map natural language to a machine interpretable meaning representation language (MRL). One of the constraints that limits full exploration of deep learning technologies for semantic parsing is the lack of sufficient annotation training data. In this paper, we propose using sequence-to-sequence in a multi-task setup for semantic parsing with focus on transfer learning. We explore three multi-task architectures for sequence-to-sequence model and compare their performance with the independently trained model. Our experiments show that the multi-task setup aids transfer learning from an auxiliary task with large labeled data to the target task with smaller labeled data. We see an absolute accuracy gain ranging from 1.0% to 4.4% in in our in-house data set and we also see good gains ranging from 2.5% to 7.0% on the ATIS semantic parsing tasks with syntactic and semantic auxiliary tasks.