Attention-based recurrent neural network models for joint intent detection and slot filling have achieved the state-of-the-art performance, while they have independent attention weights. Considering that slot and intent have the strong relationship, this paper proposes a slot gate that focuses on learning the relationship between intent and slot attention vectors in order to obtain better semantic frame results by the global optimization. The experiments show that our proposed model significantly improves sentence-level semantic frame accuracy with 4.2% and 1.9% relative improvement compared to the attentional model on benchmark ATIS and Snips datasets respectively

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Slot-gated modeling for joint slot filling and intent prediction

Intent classification and slot filling are two essential tasks for natural language understanding. They often suffer from small-scale human-labeled training data, resulting in poor generalization capability, especially for rare words. Recently a new language representation model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), facilitates pre-training deep bidirectional representations on large-scale unlabeled corpora, and has created state-of-the-art models for a wide variety of natural language processing tasks after simple fine-tuning. However, there has not been much effort on exploring BERT for natural language understanding. In this work, we propose a joint intent classification and slot filling model based on BERT. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves significant improvement on intent classification accuracy, slot filling F1, and sentence-level semantic frame accuracy on several public benchmark datasets, compared to the attention-based recurrent neural network models and slot-gated models.

BERT for Joint Intent Classification and Slot Filling

We propose a practical approach based on federated learning to solve out-of-domain issues with continuously running embedded speech-based models such as wake word detectors. We conduct an extensive empirical study of the federated averaging algorithm for the "Hey Snips" wake word based on a crowdsourced dataset that mimics a federation of wake word users. We empirically demonstrate that using an adaptive averaging strategy inspired from Adam in place of standard weighted model averaging highly reduces the number of communication rounds required to reach our target performance. The associated upstream communication costs per user are estimated at 8 MB, which is a reasonable in the context of smart home voice assistants. Additionally, the dataset used for these experiments is being open sourced with the aim of fostering further transparent research in the application of federated learning to speech data.

Federated Learning for Keyword Spotting

Language model based pre-trained models such as BERT have provided significant gains across different NLP tasks. In this paper, we study different types of transformer based pre-trained models such as auto-regressive models (GPT-2), auto-encoder models (BERT), and seq2seq models (BART) for conditional data augmentation. We show that prepending the class labels to text sequences provides a simple yet effective way to condition the pre-trained models for data augmentation. Additionally, on three classification benchmarks, pre-trained Seq2Seq model outperforms other data augmentation methods in a low-resource setting. Further, we explore how different pre-trained model based data augmentation differs in-terms of data diversity, and how well such methods preserve the class-label information.

Data Augmentation using Pre-trained Transformer Models

Whereas conventional spoken language understanding (SLU) systems map speech to text, and then text to intent, end-to-end SLU systems map speech directly to intent through a single trainable model. Achieving high accuracy with these end-to-end models without a large amount of training data is difficult. We propose a method to reduce the data requirements of end-to-end SLU in which the model is first pre-trained to predict words and phonemes, thus learning good features for SLU. We introduce a new SLU dataset, Fluent Speech Commands, and show that our method improves performance both when the full dataset is used for training and when only a small subset is used. We also describe preliminary experiments to gauge the model's ability to generalize to new phrases not heard during training.

Speech Model Pre-training for End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

This paper presents the machine learning architecture of the Snips Voice Platform, a software solution to perform Spoken Language Understanding on microprocessors typical of IoT devices. The embedded inference is fast and accurate while enforcing privacy by design, as no personal user data is ever collected. Focusing on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding, we detail our approach to training high-performance Machine Learning models that are small enough to run in real-time on small devices. Additionally, we describe a data generation procedure that provides sufficient, high-quality training data without compromising user privacy.

Snips Voice Platform: an embedded Spoken Language Understanding system for private-by-design voice interfaces

We consider the problem of performing Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) on small devices typical of IoT applications. Our contributions are twofold. First, we outline the design of an embedded, private-by-design SLU system and show that it has performance on par with cloud-based commercial solutions. Second, we release the datasets used in our experiments in the interest of reproducibility and in the hope that they can prove useful to the SLU community.

Spoken Language Understanding on the Edge

We consider the problem of performing Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) on small devices typical of IoT applications. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we outline the design of an embedded, private-by-design SLU system and show that it has performance on-par with cloud-based commercial solutions. Second, we release the datasets used in our experiments in the interest of reproducibility and in the hope that they can prove useful to the community.

Adrien Ball

Papers

Snips Voice Platform: an embedded Spoken Language Understanding system for private-by-design voice interfaces

Spoken Language Understanding on the Edge

Spoken Language Understanding on the Edge