Vijay Ramakrishnan


2019

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Entity resolution for noisy ASR transcripts
Arushi Raghuvanshi | Vijay Ramakrishnan | Varsha Embar | Lucien Carroll | Karthik Raghunathan
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations

Large vocabulary domain-agnostic Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often mistranscribe domain-specific words and phrases. Since these generic ASR systems are the first component of most voice assistants in production, building Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems that are robust to these errors can be a challenging task. In this paper, we focus on handling ASR errors in named entities, specifically person names, for a voice-based collaboration assistant. We demonstrate an effective method for resolving person names that are mistranscribed by black-box ASR systems, using character and phoneme-based information retrieval techniques and contextual information, which improves accuracy by 40.8% on our production system. We provide a live interactive demo to further illustrate the nuances of this problem and the effectiveness of our solution.