The intent recognition is an essential algorithm of any conversational AI application. It is responsible for the classification of an input message into meaningful classes. In many bot development platforms, we can configure the NLU pipeline. Several intent recognition services are currently available as an API, or we choose from many open-source alternatives. However, there is no comparison of intent recognition services and open-source algorithms. Many factors make the selection of the right approach to the intent recognition challenging in practice. In this paper, we suggest criteria to choose the best intent recognition algorithm for an application. We present a dataset for evaluation. Finally, we compare selected public NLU services with selected open-source algorithms for intent recognition.
We introduce jiant, an open source toolkit for conducting multitask and transfer learning experiments on English NLU tasks. jiant enables modular and configuration-driven experimentation with state-of-the-art models and implements a broad set of tasks for probing, transfer learning, and multitask training experiments. jiant implements over 50 NLU tasks, including all GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmark tasks. We demonstrate that jiant reproduces published performance on a variety of tasks and models, including BERT and RoBERTa. jiant is available at https://jiant.info.
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University（纽约大学库朗数学科学研究所）；Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；DeepMind（深度思维）
For natural language understanding (NLU) technology to be maximally useful, both practically and as a scientific object of study, it must be general: it must be able to process language in a way that is not exclusively tailored to any one specific task or dataset. In pursuit of this objective, we introduce the General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark (GLUE), a tool for evaluating and analyzing the performance of models across a diverse range of existing NLU tasks. GLUE is model-agnostic, but it incentivizes sharing knowledge across tasks because certain tasks have very limited train…
The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Bucerius Law School（布塞留斯法学院）；Stanford Law School（斯坦福法学院）；Athens University of Economics and Business（雅典经济与商业大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Illinois Tech – Chicago Kent College of Law（伊利诺伊理工大学——芝加哥肯特法学院）
Laws and their interpretations, legal arguments and agreements\ are typically expressed in writing, leading to the production of vast corpora of legal text. Their analysis, which is at the center of legal practice, becomes increasingly elaborate as these collections grow in size. Natural language understanding (NLU) technologies can be a valuable tool to support legal practitioners in these endeavors. Their usefulness, however, largely depends on whether current state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the legal domain. To answer this currently open question, we introduce…
We present MT-DNN, an open-source natural language understanding (NLU) toolkit that makes it easy for researchers and developers to train customized deep learning models. Built upon PyTorch and Transformers, MT-DNN is designed to facilitate rapid customization for a broad spectrum of NLU tasks, using a variety of objectives (classification, regression, structured prediction) and text encoders (e.g., RNNs, BERT, RoBERTa, UniLM). A unique feature of MT-DNN is its built-in support for robust and transferable learning using the adversarial multi-task learning paradigm. To enable efficient producti…
The few-shot natural language understanding (NLU) task has attracted much recent attention. However, prior methods have been evaluated under a disparate set of protocols, which hinders fair comparison and measuring progress of the field. To address this issue, we introduce an evaluation framework that improves previous evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., test performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. Under this new evaluation framework, we re-evaluate several state-of-the-art few-shot methods for NLU tasks. Our framework reveals new insights: (1) both the absolute perform…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Disney Research（迪士尼研究院）
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) typically comprises of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) followed by a natural language understanding (NLU) module. The two modules process signals in a blocking sequential fashion, i.e., the NLU often has to wait for the ASR to finish processing on an utterance basis, potentially leading to high latencies that render the spoken interaction less natural. In this paper, we propose recurrent neural network (RNN) based incremental processing towards the SLU task of intent detection. The proposed methodology offers lower latencies than a typical SLU system, …
These days, vast amounts of knowledge are available online, most of it in written form. Search engines help us access this knowledge, but aggregating, relating and reasoning with it is still a predominantly human effort. One of the key challenges for automated reasoning based on natural-language texts is the need to extract meaning (semantics) from texts. Natural language understanding (NLU) systems describe the conversion from a set of natural language utterances to terms in a particular logic. Tools for the co-development of grammar and target logic are currently largely missing. We will des…
Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）；The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Emotech North LTD（北英莫科技有限公司）
We have recently seen the emergence of several publicly available Natural Language Understanding (NLU) toolkits, which map user utterances to structured, but more abstract, Dialogue Act (DA) or Intent specifications, while making this process accessible to the lay developer. In this paper, we present the first wide coverage evaluation and comparison of some of the most popular NLU services, on a large, multi-domain (21 domains) dataset of 25K user utterances that we have collected and annotated with Intent and Entity Type specifications and which will be released as part of this submission. Th…
Saarland University（萨尔大学）；DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）；Jadavpur University（贾达普大学）
This paper describes strategies to improve an existing web-based computer-aided translation (CAT) tool entitled CATaLog Online. CATaLog Online provides a post-editing environment with simple yet helpful project management tools. It offers translation suggestions from translation memories (TM), machine translation (MT), and automatic post-editing (APE) and records detailed logs of post-editing activities. To test the new approaches proposed in this paper, we carried out a user study on an English--German translation task using CATaLog Online. User feedback revealed that the users preferred usin…
We introduce a pair of tools, Rasa NLU and Rasa Core, which are open source python libraries for building conversational software. Their purpose is to make machine-learning based dialogue management and language understanding accessible to non-specialist software developers. In terms of design philosophy, we aim for ease of use, and bootstrapping from minimal (or no) initial training data. Both packages are extensively documented and ship with a comprehensive suite of tests. The code is available at https://github.com/RasaHQ/
Natural Language Processing offers new insights into language data across almost all disciplines and domains, and allows us to corroborate and/or challenge existing knowledge. The primary hurdles to widening participation in and use of these new research tools are, first, a lack of coding skills in students across K-16, and in the population at large, and second, a lack of knowledge of how NLP-methods can be used to answer questions of disciplinary interest outside of linguistics and/or computer science. To broaden participation in NLP and improve NLP-literacy, we introduced a new tool web-bas…
EvoGrader is a free, online, on-demand formative assessment service designed for use in undergraduate biology classrooms. EvoGrader's web portal is powered by Amazon's Elastic Cloud and run with LightSIDE Lab's open-source machine-learning tools. The EvoGrader web portal allows biology instructors to upload a response file (.csv) containing unlimited numbers of evolutionary explanations written in response to 86 different ACORNS (Assessing COntextual Reasoning about Natural Selection) instrument items. The system automatically analyzes the responses and provides detailed information about the …
University of Yamanashi（山梨大学）；Tsukuba University of Technology（筑波技术大学）；University of Tsukuba（筑波大学）
This paper describes the ExKaldi-RT online automatic speech recognition (ASR) toolkit that is implemented based on the Kaldi ASR toolkit and Python language. ExKaldi-RT provides tools for building online recognition pipelines. While similar tools are available built on Kaldi, a key feature of ExKaldi-RT that it works on Python, which has an easy-to-use interface that allows online ASR system developers to develop original research, such as by applying neural network-based signal processing and by decoding model trained with deep learning frameworks. We performed benchmark experiments on the mi…
There are many research tools which are also used for teaching the acoustic phonetics of speech rhythm and speech melody. But they were not purpose-designed for teaching-learning situations, and some have a steep learning curve. CRAFT (Creation and Recovery of Amplitude and Frequency Tracks) is custom-designed as a novel flexible online tool for visualisation and critical comparison of functions and transforms, with implementations of the Reaper, RAPT, PyRapt, YAAPT, YIN and PySWIPE F0 estimators, three Praat configurations, and two purpose-built estimators, PyAMDF, S0FT. Visualisations of amp…
This study evaluated the ability of ChatGPT, a recently developed artificial intelligence (AI) agent, to perform high-level cognitive tasks and produce text that is indistinguishable from human-generated text. This capacity raises concerns about the potential use of ChatGPT as a tool for academic misconduct in online exams. The study found that ChatGPT is capable of exhibiting critical thinking skills and generating highly realistic text with minimal input, making it a potential threat to the integrity of online exams, particularly in tertiary education settings where such exams are becoming m…
POLAREZ ENGINEERING（POLAREZ工程公司）；TU Bergakademie Freiberg（弗赖贝格工业大学）；University of Bielefeld（比勒费尔德大学）
The number of scientific papers grows exponentially in many disciplines. The share of online available papers grows as well. At the same time, the period of time for a paper to loose at chance to be cited anymore shortens. The decay of the citing rate shows similarity to ultradiffusional processes as for other online contents in social networks. The distribution of papers per author shows similarity to the distribution of posts per user in social networks. The rate of uncited papers for online available papers grows while some papers 'go viral' in terms of being cited. Summarized, the practice…
