arXiv subjects

Lambert Mathias

Publications and source records attributed to Lambert Mathias.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Cross-Lingual Approaches to Reference Resolution in Dialogue Systems

In the slot-filling paradigm, where a user can refer back to slots in the context during the conversation, the goal of the contextual understanding system is to resolve the referring expressions to the appropriate slots in the context. In this paper, we build on the context carryover system~\citep{Naik2018ContextualSC}, which provides a scalable multi-domain framework for resolving references. However, scaling this approach across languages is not a trivial task, due to the large demand on acquisition of annotated data in the target language. Our main focus is on cross-lingual methods for reference resolution as a way to alleviate the need for annotated data in the target language. In the cross-lingual setup, we assume there is access to annotated resources as well as a well trained model in the source language and little to no annotated data in the target language. In this paper, we explore three different approaches for cross-lingual transfer \textemdash~\ delexicalization as data augmentation, multilingual embeddings and machine translation. We compare these approaches both on a low resource setting as well as a large resource setting. Our experiments show that multilingual embeddings and delexicalization via data augmentation have a significant impact in the low resource setting, but the gains diminish as the amount of available data in the target language increases. Furthermore, when combined with machine translation we can get performance very close to actual live data in the target language, with only 25\% of the data projected into the target language.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Contextual Slot Carryover for Disparate Schemas

In the slot-filling paradigm, where a user can refer back to slots in the context during a conversation, the goal of the contextual understanding system is to resolve the referring expressions to the appropriate slots in the context. In large-scale multi-domain systems, this presents two challenges - scaling to a very large and potentially unbounded set of slot values, and dealing with diverse schemas. We present a neural network architecture that addresses the slot value scalability challenge by reformulating the contextual interpretation as a decision to carryover a slot from a set of possible candidates. To deal with heterogenous schemas, we introduce a simple data-driven method for trans- forming the candidate slots. Our experiments show that our approach can scale to multiple domains and provides competitive results over a strong baseline.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Transfer Learning for Neural Semantic Parsing

The goal of semantic parsing is to map natural language to a machine interpretable meaning representation language (MRL). One of the constraints that limits full exploration of deep learning technologies for semantic parsing is the lack of sufficient annotation training data. In this paper, we propose using sequence-to-sequence in a multi-task setup for semantic parsing with a focus on transfer learning. We explore three multi-task architectures for sequence-to-sequence modeling and compare their performance with an independently trained model. Our experiments show that the multi-task setup aids transfer learning from an auxiliary task with large labeled data to a target task with smaller labeled data. We see absolute accuracy gains ranging from 1.0% to 4.4% in our in- house data set, and we also see good gains ranging from 2.5% to 7.0% on the ATIS semantic parsing tasks with syntactic and semantic auxiliary tasks.

cs.CL↗