Neural Networks approaches focused on French Spoken Language Understanding: application to the MEDIA Evaluation Task

Sahar Ghannay, Christophe Servan, Sophie Rosset


Abstract
In this paper, we present a study on a French Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) task: the MEDIA task. Many works and studies have been proposed for many tasks, but most of them are focused on English language and tasks. The exploration of a richer language like French within the framework of a SLU task implies to recent approaches to handle this difficulty. Since the MEDIA task seems to be one of the most difficult, according several previous studies, we propose to explore Neural Networks approaches focusing of three aspects: firstly, the Neural Network inputs and more specifically the word embeddings; secondly, we compared French version of BERT against the best setup through different ways; Finally, the comparison against State-of-the-Art approaches. Results show that the word embeddings trained on a small corpus need to be updated during SLU model training. Furthermore, the French BERT fine-tuned approaches outperform the classical Neural Network Architectures and achieves state of the art results. However, the contextual embeddings extracted from one of the French BERT approaches achieve comparable results in comparison to word embedding, when integrated into the proposed neural architecture.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.245
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2722–2727
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.245
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.245
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sahar Ghannay, Christophe Servan, and Sophie Rosset. 2020. Neural Networks approaches focused on French Spoken Language Understanding: application to the MEDIA Evaluation Task. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2722–2727, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural Networks approaches focused on French Spoken Language Understanding: application to the MEDIA Evaluation Task (Ghannay et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2020.coling-main.245.pdf
Code
 saharghannay/media_eval