Jingfen Zhang


2023

pdf bib
Multi-teacher Distillation for Multilingual Spelling Correction
Jingfen Zhang | Xuan Guo | Sravan Bodapati | Christopher Potts
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Accurate spelling correction is a critical step in modern search interfaces, especially in an era of mobile devices and speech-to-text interfaces. For services that are deployed around the world, this poses a significant challenge for multilingual NLP: spelling errors need to be caught and corrected in all languages, and even in queries that use multiple languages. In this paper, we tackle this challenge using multi-teacher distillation. On our approach, a monolingual teacher model is trained for each language/locale, and these individual models are distilled into a single multilingual student model intended to serve all languages/locales. In experiments using open-source data as well as customer data from a worldwide search service, we show that this leads to highly effective spelling correction models that can meet the tight latency requirements of deployed services.