Vijay Gurbani


2022

pdf
A low latency technique for speaker detection from a large negative list
Yu Zhou | B. Chandra Mouli | Vijay Gurbani
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP 2022)

2021

pdf
Improved Named Entity Recognition for Noisy Call Center Transcripts
Sam Davidson | Jordan Hosier | Yu Zhou | Vijay Gurbani
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2021)

We explore the application of state-of-the-art NER algorithms to ASR-generated call center transcripts. Previous work in this domain focused on the use of a BiLSTM-CRF model which relied on Flair embeddings; however, such a model is unwieldy in terms of latency and memory consumption. In a production environment, end users require low-latency models which can be readily integrated into existing pipelines. To that end, we present two different models which can be utilized based on the latency and accuracy requirements of the user. First, we propose a set of models which utilize state-of-the-art Transformer language models (RoBERTa) to develop a high-accuracy NER system trained on custom annotated set of call center transcripts. We then use our best-performing Transformer-based model to label a large number of transcripts, which we use to pretrain a BiLSTM-CRF model and further fine-tune on our annotated dataset. We show that this model, while not as accurate as its Transformer-based counterpart, is highly effective in identifying items which require redaction for privacy law compliance. Further, we propose a new general annotation scheme for NER in the call-center environment.