William M. Campbell


2020

pdf bib
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Life-long Learning for Spoken Language Systems
William M. Campbell | Alex Waibel | Dilek Hakkani-Tur | Timothy J. Hazen | Kevin Kilgour | Eunah Cho | Varun Kumar | Hadrien Glaude
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Life-long Learning for Spoken Language Systems

2019

pdf
Paraphrase Generation for Semi-Supervised Learning in NLU
Eunah Cho | He Xie | William M. Campbell
Proceedings of the Workshop on Methods for Optimizing and Evaluating Neural Language Generation

Semi-supervised learning is an efficient way to improve performance for natural language processing systems. In this work, we propose Para-SSL, a scheme to generate candidate utterances using paraphrasing and methods from semi-supervised learning. In order to perform paraphrase generation in the context of a dialog system, we automatically extract paraphrase pairs to create a paraphrase corpus. Using this data, we build a paraphrase generation system and perform one-to-many generation, followed by a validation step to select only the utterances with good quality. The paraphrase-based semi-supervised learning is applied to five functionalities in a natural language understanding system. Our proposed method for semi-supervised learning using paraphrase generation does not require user utterances and can be applied prior to releasing a new functionality to a system. Experiments show that we can achieve up to 19% of relative slot error reduction without an access to user utterances, and up to 35% when leveraging live traffic utterances.