Sidharth Mudgal


2021

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A Scalable Framework for Learning From Implicit User Feedback to Improve Natural Language Understanding in Large-Scale Conversational AI Systems
Sunghyun Park | Han Li | Ameen Patel | Sidharth Mudgal | Sungjin Lee | Young-Bum Kim | Spyros Matsoukas | Ruhi Sarikaya
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is an established component within a conversational AI or digital assistant system, and it is responsible for producing semantic understanding of a user request. We propose a scalable and automatic approach for improving NLU in a large-scale conversational AI system by leveraging implicit user feedback, with an insight that user interaction data and dialog context have rich information embedded from which user satisfaction and intention can be inferred. In particular, we propose a domain-agnostic framework for curating new supervision data for improving NLU from live production traffic. With an extensive set of experiments, we show the results of applying the framework and improving NLU for a large-scale production system across 10 domains.

2019

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Continuous Learning for Large-scale Personalized Domain Classification
Han Li | Jihwan Lee | Sidharth Mudgal | Ruhi Sarikaya | Young-Bum Kim
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Domain classification is the task to map spoken language utterances to one of the natural language understanding domains in intelligent personal digital assistants (IPDAs). This is observed in mainstream IPDAs in industry and third-party domains are developed to enhance the capability of the IPDAs. As more and more new domains are developed very frequently, how to continuously accommodate the new domains still remains challenging. Moreover, if one wants to use personalized information dynamically for better domain classification, it is infeasible to directly adopt existing continual learning approaches. In this paper, we propose CoNDA, a neural-based approach for continuous domain adaption with normalization and regularization. Unlike existing methods that often conduct full model parameter update, CoNDA only updates the necessary parameters in the model for the new domains. Empirical evaluation shows that CoNDA achieves high accuracy on both the accommodated new domains and the existing known domains for which input samples come with personal information, and outperforms the baselines by a large margin.

2018

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Generalizing Word Embeddings using Bag of Subwords
Jinman Zhao | Sidharth Mudgal | Yingyu Liang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We approach the problem of generalizing pre-trained word embeddings beyond fixed-size vocabularies without using additional contextual information. We propose a subword-level word vector generation model that views words as bags of character n-grams. The model is simple, fast to train and provides good vectors for rare or unseen words. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances in English word similarity task and in joint prediction of part-of-speech tag and morphosyntactic attributes in 23 languages, suggesting our model’s ability in capturing the relationship between words’ textual representations and their embeddings.