Ryan Price


2021

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A Hybrid Approach to Scalable and Robust Spoken Language Understanding in Enterprise Virtual Agents
Ryan Price | Mahnoosh Mehrabani | Narendra Gupta | Yeon-Jun Kim | Shahab Jalalvand | Minhua Chen | Yanjie Zhao | Srinivas Bangalore
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Industry Papers

Spoken language understanding (SLU) extracts the intended mean- ing from a user utterance and is a critical component of conversational virtual agents. In enterprise virtual agents (EVAs), language understanding is substantially challenging. First, the users are infrequent callers who are unfamiliar with the expectations of a pre-designed conversation flow. Second, the users are paying customers of an enterprise who demand a reliable, consistent and efficient user experience when resolving their issues. In this work, we describe a general and robust framework for intent and entity extraction utilizing a hybrid of statistical and rule-based approaches. Our framework includes confidence modeling that incorporates information from all components in the SLU pipeline, a critical addition for EVAs to en- sure accuracy. Our focus is on creating accurate and scalable SLU that can be deployed rapidly for a large class of EVA applications with little need for human intervention.