Matrix decomposition methods, such as Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and its importance-weighted variants, have been widely used for compressing Transformer-based language models. While importance-weighted decomposition methods alleviate the strong assumption of equal importance for each parameter in SVD, they still rely on two fundamental assumptions: 1) unchanged importance distribution during further fine-tuning, 2) equal importance across weight matrices in different layers. Furthermore, these methods necessitate a well-trained task-specific model as the starting point and require additional fine-tuning after compression. In this work, we proposed RankDyna, a matrix decomposition method that enables dynamic rank resource allocation among matrices across different layers during the training process. Starting from a general pre-trained model, RankDyna accomplishes the dual goals of compression and adaptation to the downstream task, all within a single round of fine-tuning. The extensive evaluations demonstrate that RankDyna can outperform current SOTA methods under various parameter budget levels, and the advantage of RankDyna is further enhanced with higher compression rates.

Singular value decomposition (SVD) is one of the most popular compression methods that approximate a target matrix with smaller matrices. However, standard SVD treats the parameters within the matrix with equal importance, which is a simple but unrealistic assumption. The parameters of a trained neural network model may affect the task performance unevenly, which suggests non-equal importance among the parameters. Compared to SVD, the decomposition method aware of parameter importance is the more practical choice in real cases. Unlike standard SVD, weighed value decomposition is a non-convex optimization problem that lacks a closed-form solution. We systematically investigated multiple optimization strategies to tackle the problem and examined our method by compressing Transformer-based language models. Further, we designed a metric to predict when the SVD may introduce a significant performance drop, for which our method can be a rescue strategy. The extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method can perform better than current SOTA methods in compressing Transformer-based language models.

Domain classification is the fundamental task in natural language understanding (NLU), which often requires fast accommodation to new emerging domains. This constraint makes it impossible to retrain all previous domains, even if they are accessible to the new model. Most existing continual learning approaches suffer from low accuracy and performance fluctuation, especially when the distributions of old and new data are significantly different. In fact, the key real-world problem is not the absence of old data, but the inefficiency to retrain the model with the whole old dataset. Is it potential to utilize some old data to yield high accuracy and maintain stable performance, while at the same time, without introducing extra hyperparameters? In this paper, we proposed a hyperparameter-free continual learning model for text data that can stably produce high performance under various environments. Specifically, we utilize Fisher information to select exemplars that can “record” key information of the original model. Also, a novel scheme called dynamical weight consolidation is proposed to enable hyperparameter-free learning during the retrain process. Extensive experiments demonstrate baselines provide fluctuated performance which makes them useless in practice. On the contrary, our proposed model significantly and consistently outperforms the best state-of-the-art method by up to 20% in average accuracy, and each of its component contributes effectively to overall performance.

Intent classification is a major task in spoken language understanding (SLU). Since most models are built with pre-collected in-domain (IND) training utterances, their ability to detect unsupported out-of-domain (OOD) utterances has a critical effect in practical use. Recent works have shown that using extra data and labels can improve the OOD detection performance, yet it could be costly to collect such data. This paper proposes to train a model with only IND data while supporting both IND intent classification and OOD detection. Our method designs a novel domain-regularized module (DRM) to reduce the overconfident phenomenon of a vanilla classifier, achieving a better generalization in both cases. Besides, DRM can be used as a drop-in replacement for the last layer in any neural network-based intent classifier, providing a low-cost strategy for a significant improvement. The evaluation on four datasets shows that our method built on BERT and RoBERTa models achieves state-of-the-art performance against existing approaches and the strong baselines we created for the comparisons.

Existing open-domain dialogue generation models are usually trained to mimic the gold response in the training set using cross-entropy loss on the vocabulary. However, a good response does not need to resemble the gold response, since there are multiple possible responses to a given prompt. In this work, we hypothesize that the current models are unable to integrate information from multiple semantically similar valid responses of a prompt, resulting in the generation of generic and uninformative responses. To address this issue, we propose an alternative to the end-to-end classification on vocabulary. We learn the pair relationship between the prompts and responses as a regression task on a latent space instead. In our novel dialog generation model, the representations of semantically related sentences are close to each other on the latent space. Human evaluation showed that learning the task on a continuous space can generate responses that are both relevant and informative.

With the rapid development in deep learning, deep neural networks have been widely adopted in many real-life natural language applications. Under deep neural networks, a pre-defined vocabulary is required to vectorize text inputs. The canonical approach to select pre-defined vocabulary is based on the word frequency, where a threshold is selected to cut off the long tail distribution. However, we observed that such a simple approach could easily lead to under-sized vocabulary or over-sized vocabulary issues. Therefore, we are interested in understanding how the end-task classification accuracy is related to the vocabulary size and what is the minimum required vocabulary size to achieve a specific performance. In this paper, we provide a more sophisticated variational vocabulary dropout (VVD) based on variational dropout to perform vocabulary selection, which can intelligently select the subset of the vocabulary to achieve the required performance. To evaluate different algorithms on the newly proposed vocabulary selection problem, we propose two new metrics: Area Under Accuracy-Vocab Curve and Vocab Size under X% Accuracy Drop. Through extensive experiments on various NLP classification tasks, our variational framework is shown to significantly outperform the frequency-based and other selection baselines on these metrics.

We present SkillBot that takes the first step to enable end users to teach new skills in personal assistants (PA). Unlike existing PA products that need software developers to build new skills via IDE tools, an end user can use SkillBot to build new skills just by naturally demonstrating the task on device screen. SkillBot automatically develops a natural language understanding (NLU) engine and implements the action without the need of coding. On both benchmark and in-house datasets, we validate the competitive performance of SkillBot automatically built NLU. We also observe that it only takes a few minutes for an end user to build a new skill using SkillBot.

Semantic slot filling is one of the major tasks in spoken language understanding (SLU). After a slot filling model is trained on precollected data, it is crucial to continually improve the model after deployment to learn users’ new expressions. As the data amount grows, it becomes infeasible to either store such huge data and repeatedly retrain the model on all data or fine tune the model only on new data without forgetting old expressions. In this paper, we introduce a novel progressive slot filling model, ProgModel. ProgModel consists of a novel context gate that transfers previously learned knowledge to a small size expanded component; and meanwhile enables this new component to be fast trained to learn from new data. As such, ProgModel learns the new knowledge by only using new data at each time and meanwhile preserves the previously learned expressions. Our experiments show that ProgModel needs much less training time and smaller model size to outperform various model fine tuning competitors by up to 4.24% and 3.03% on two benchmark datasets.

Semantic parsers are used to convert user’s natural language commands to executable logical form in intelligent personal agents. Labeled datasets required to train such parsers are expensive to collect, and are never comprehensive. As a result, for effective post-deployment domain adaptation and personalization, semantic parsers are continuously retrained to learn new user vocabulary and paraphrase variety. However, state-of-the art attention based neural parsers are slow to retrain which inhibits real time domain adaptation. Secondly, these parsers do not leverage numerous paraphrases already present in the training dataset. Designing parsers which can simultaneously maintain high accuracy and fast retraining time is challenging. In this paper, we present novel paraphrase attention based sequence-to-sequence/tree parsers which support fast near real time retraining. In addition, our parsers often boost accuracy by jointly modeling the semantic dependencies of paraphrases. We evaluate our model on benchmark datasets to demonstrate upto 9X speedup in retraining time compared to existing parsers, as well as achieving state-of-the-art accuracy.

Intent detection and slot filling are two main tasks for building a spoken language understanding(SLU) system. Multiple deep learning based models have demonstrated good results on these tasks . The most effective algorithms are based on the structures of sequence to sequence models (or “encoder-decoder” models), and generate the intents and semantic tags either using separate models. Most of the previous studies, however, either treat the intent detection and slot filling as two separate parallel tasks, or use a sequence to sequence model to generate both semantic tags and intent. None of the approaches consider the cross-impact between the intent detection task and the slot filling task. In this paper, new Bi-model based RNN semantic frame parsing network structures are designed to perform the intent detection and slot filling tasks jointly, by considering their cross-impact to each other using two correlated bidirectional LSTMs (BLSTM). Our Bi-model structure with a decoder achieves state-of-art result on the benchmark ATIS data, with about 0.5% intent accuracy improvement and 0.9 % slot filling improvement.

We present a system, CRUISE, that guides ordinary software developers to build a high quality natural language understanding (NLU) engine from scratch. This is the fundamental step of building a new skill in personal assistants. Unlike existing solutions that require either developers or crowdsourcing to manually generate and annotate a large number of utterances, we design a hybrid rule-based and data-driven approach with the capability to iteratively generate more and more utterances. Our system only requires light human workload to iteratively prune incorrect utterances. CRUISE outputs a well trained NLU engine and a large scale annotated utterance corpus that third parties can use to develop their custom skills. Using both benchmark dataset and custom datasets we collected in real-world settings, we validate the high quality of CRUISE generated utterances via both competitive NLU performance and human evaluation. We also show the largely reduced human workload in terms of both cognitive load and human pruning time consumption.