Yanjie Zhao


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.

2018

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Baseline: A Library for Rapid Modeling, Experimentation and Development of Deep Learning Algorithms targeting NLP
Daniel Pressel | Sagnik Ray Choudhury | Brian Lester | Yanjie Zhao | Matt Barta
Proceedings of Workshop for NLP Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)

We introduce Baseline: a library for reproducible deep learning research and fast model development for NLP. The library provides easily extensible abstractions and implementations for data loading, model development, training and export of deep learning architectures. It also provides implementations for simple, high-performance, deep learning models for various NLP tasks, against which newly developed models can be compared. Deep learning experiments are hard to reproduce, Baseline provides functionalities to track them. The goal is to allow a researcher to focus on model development, delegating the repetitive tasks to the library.