A Hybrid Approach to Scalable and Robust Spoken Language Understanding in Enterprise Virtual Agents
Ryan Price, Mahnoosh Mehrabani, Narendra Gupta, Yeon-Jun Kim, Shahab Jalalvand, Minhua Chen, Yanjie Zhao, Srinivas Bangalore
Abstract
Spoken language understanding (SLU) extracts the intended mean- ing from a user utterance and is a critical component of conversational virtual agents. In enterprise virtual agents (EVAs), language understanding is substantially challenging. First, the users are infrequent callers who are unfamiliar with the expectations of a pre-designed conversation flow. Second, the users are paying customers of an enterprise who demand a reliable, consistent and efficient user experience when resolving their issues. In this work, we describe a general and robust framework for intent and entity extraction utilizing a hybrid of statistical and rule-based approaches. Our framework includes confidence modeling that incorporates information from all components in the SLU pipeline, a critical addition for EVAs to en- sure accuracy. Our focus is on creating accurate and scalable SLU that can be deployed rapidly for a large class of EVA applications with little need for human intervention.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.naacl-industry.9
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Young-bum Kim, Yunyao Li, Owen Rambow
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 63–71
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2021.naacl-industry.9/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-industry.9
- Cite (ACL):
- Ryan Price, Mahnoosh Mehrabani, Narendra Gupta, Yeon-Jun Kim, Shahab Jalalvand, Minhua Chen, Yanjie Zhao, and Srinivas Bangalore. 2021. A Hybrid Approach to Scalable and Robust Spoken Language Understanding in Enterprise Virtual Agents. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers, pages 63–71, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Hybrid Approach to Scalable and Robust Spoken Language Understanding in Enterprise Virtual Agents (Price et al., NAACL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2021.naacl-industry.9.pdf