United States

This paper presents a production Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) pipeline based on the student-teacher framework, which leverages millions of unlabeled examples to improve Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. We investigate two questions related to the use of unlabeled data in the production SSL context: 1) how to select samples from a huge unlabeled data pool that are beneficial for SSL training, and 2) how do the selected data affect the performance of different state-of-the-art SSL techniques. We compare four widely used SSL techniques, Pseudo-Label (PL), Knowledge Distillation (KD), Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT), and Cross-View Training (CVT) in conjunction with two data selection methods including committee-based selection and submodular optimization-based selection. We further examine the benefits and drawbacks of these techniques when applied to intent classification (IC) and named entity recognition (NER) tasks in the English language using a public dataset (SNIPS) and real-world data from Amazon Alexa. To conclude we provide guidelines specifying when each of these methods might be beneficial to improve large-scale NLU systems.


NAACL 2021

Industry Scale Semi-Supervised Learning for Natural Language Understanding

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

We introduce Plotting Agent, a system that enables users to directly manipulate plots using natural language instructions within an interactive programming environment. It maps language to plot updates. We formulate this problem as a slot-based task-oriented dialog problem, which we tackle with a sequence-to-sequence model. Practitioners such as data scientists broadly defined, and researchers interested in Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) may find our demo useful.


Interactive Plot Manipulation using Natural Language

To combat COVID-19, both clinicians and scientists need to digest vast amounts of relevant biomedical knowledge in scientific literature to understand the disease mechanism and related biological functions. We have developed a novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements (entities and their visual chemical structures, relations, and events) from the scientific literature. We then exploit the constructed multimedia knowledge graphs (KGs) for question answering and report generation, using drug repurposing as a case study. Our framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence.


COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation

Embeddings of words and concepts capture syntactic and semantic regularities of language; however, they have seen limited use as tools to study characteristics of different corpora and how they relate to one another. We introduce TextEssence, an interactive system designed to enable comparative analysis of corpora using embeddings. TextEssence includes visual, neighbor-based, and similarity-based modes of embedding analysis in a lightweight, web-based interface. We further propose a new measure of embedding confidence based on nearest neighborhood overlap, to assist in identifying high-quality embeddings for corpus analysis. A case study on COVID-19 scientific literature illustrates the utility of the system. TextEssence can be found at https: //textessence.github.io.


TextEssence: A Tool for Interactive Analysis of Semantic Shifts Between Corpora

We present a tool that provides automated feedback to students studying Spanish writing. The feedback is given for four categories: topic development, coherence, writing conventions, and essay organization. The tool is made freely available via a Google Docs add-on. A small user study with post-secondary level students in Mexico shows that students found the tool generally helpful and that most of them plan to continue using it as they work to improve their writing skills. In an analysis of 6 months of user data, we see that a small number of users continue to engage with the app, even outside of planned user studies.


Supporting Spanish Writers using Automated Feedback

We present Alexa Conversations, a new approach for building goal-oriented dialogue systems that is scalable, extensible as well as data efficient. The components of this system are trained in a data-driven manner, but instead of collecting annotated conversations for training, we generate them using a novel dialogue simulator based on a few seed dialogues and specifications of APIs and entities provided by the developer.


Alexa Conversations: An Extensible Data-driven Approach for Building Task-oriented Dialogue Systems

Despite impressive performance on standard benchmarks, natural language processing (NLP) models are often brittle when deployed in real-world systems. In this work, we identify challenges with evaluating NLP systems and propose a solution in the form of Robustness Gym (RG), a simple and extensible evaluation toolkit that unifies 4 standard evaluation paradigms: subpopulations, transformations, evaluation sets, and adversarial attacks. By providing a common platform for evaluation, RG enables practitioners to compare results from disparate evaluation paradigms with a single click, and to easily develop and share novel evaluation methods using a built-in set of abstractions. RG is under active development and we welcome feedback & contributions from the community.


Robustness Gym: Unifying the NLP Evaluation Landscape

Detecting an Out-of-Domain (OOD) utterance is crucial for a robust dialog system. Most dialog systems are trained on a pool of annotated OOD data to achieve this goal. However, collecting the annotated OOD data for a given domain is an expensive process. To mitigate this issue, previous works have proposed generative adversarial networks (GAN) based models to generate OOD data for a given domain automatically. However, these proposed models do not work directly with the text. They work with the text’s latent space instead, enforcing these models to include components responsible for encoding text into latent space and decoding it back, such as auto-encoder. These components increase the model complexity, making it difficult to train.
We propose OodGAN, a sequential generative adversarial network (SeqGAN) based model for OOD data generation. Our proposed model works directly on the text and hence eliminates the need to include an auto-encoder. OOD data generated using OodGAN model outperforms state-of-the-art in OOD detection metrics for ROSTD (67% relative improvement in FPR 0.95) and OSQ datasets (28% relative improvement in FPR 0.95) (Zheng et al., 2020).


OodGAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Out-of-Domain Data Generation

In developing an online question-answering system for the medical domains, natural language inference (NLI) models play a central role in question matching and intention detection. However, which models are best for our datasets? Manually selecting or tuning a model is time-consuming. Thus we experiment with automatically optimizing the model architectures on the task at hand via neural architecture search (NAS). First, we formulate a novel architecture search space based on the previous NAS literature, supporting cross-sentence attention (cross-attn) modeling. Second, we propose to modify the ENAS method to accelerate and stabilize the search results. We conduct extensive experiments on our two medical NLI tasks. Results show that our system can easily outperform the classical baseline models. We compare different NAS methods and demonstrate that our approach provides the best results.


Discovering Better Model Architectures for Medical Query Understanding

Neural models for text generation are often designed in an end-to-end fashion, typically with zero control over intermediate computations, limiting their practical usability in downstream applications. In this work, we incorporate explicit means into neural models to ensure topical continuity, content comprehensiveness and informativeness of automatically generated radiology reports. We propose a
method to compute image representations specific to each sentential context to minimize hallucination caused by sequence-to-sequence approaches and to further eliminate redundant content by exploiting diverse sentence states.
We conduct experiments to generate radiology reports from medical images of chest x-rays using MIMIC-CXR. Our model outperforms baselines by up to 18% and 29% respective in the evaluation for informativeness and content ordering respectively on objective metrics and 16% on human validation


Coherent and Concise Radiology Report Generation via Context Specific Image Representations and Orthogonal Sentence States

Walk through Challenges of intent detection iin real world setting and performance benchmark of open-source solutions and commercial solutions.


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Interactive Plot Manipulation using Natural Language

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