Current virtual assistant (VA) platforms are beholden to the limited number of languages they support. Every component, such as the tokenizer and intent classifier, is engineered for specific languages in these intricate platforms. Thus, supporting a new language in such platforms is a resource-intensive operation requiring expensive re-training and re-designing. In this paper, we propose a benchmark for evaluating language-agnostic intent classification, the most critical component of VA platforms. To ensure the benchmarking is challenging and comprehensive, we include 29 public and internal datasets across 10 low-resource languages and evaluate various training and testing settings with consideration of both accuracy and training time. The benchmarking result shows that Watson Assistant, among 7 commercial VA platforms and pre-trained multilingual language models (LMs), demonstrates close-to-best accuracy with the best accuracy-training time trade-off.

Recent years have witnessed the prevalent application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in NLP. From the perspective of parameter space, PLMs provide generic initialization, starting from which high-performance minima could be found. Although plenty of works have studied how to effectively and efficiently adapt PLMs to high-performance minima, little is known about the connection of various minima reached under different adaptation configurations. In this paper, we investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which measures whether two minima can be connected with a low-loss path. We conduct empirical analyses to investigate three questions: (1) how could hyperparameters, specific tuning methods, and training data affect PLM’s mode connectivity? (2) How does mode connectivity change during pre-training? (3) How does the PLM’s task knowledge change along the path connecting two minima? In general, exploring the mode connectivity of PLMs conduces to understanding the geometric connection of different minima, which may help us fathom the inner workings of PLM downstream adaptation. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/Mode-Connectivity-PLM.

Out of Scope (OOS) detection in Conversational AI solutions enables a chatbot to handle a conversation gracefully when it is unable to make sense of the end-user query. Accurately tagging a query as out-of-domain is particularly hard in scenarios when the chatbot is not equipped to handle a topic which has semantic overlap with an existing topic it is trained on. We propose a simple yet effective OOS detection method that outperforms standard OOS detection methods in a real-world deployment of virtual assistants. We discuss the various design and deployment considerations for a cloud platform solution to train virtual assistants and deploy them at scale. Additionally, we propose a collection of datasets that replicates real-world scenarios and show comprehensive results in various settings using both offline and online evaluation metrics.