10 accepted papers
The retriever, which retrieves relevant knowledge pieces from a knowledge base given a context, is an important component in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Retrievers have been introduced in knowledge-grounded dialog systems to improve knowledge acquisition. In knowledge-grounded dial…
Recent researches have shown that multi-task instruction tuning after pre-training greatly improves the model’s robustness and transfer ability, which is crucial for building a high-quality dialog system. However, most previous works on multi-task instruction tuning rely heavily on human-defined inp…
There has been a long recognition that discrete features (n-gram features) and neural network based features have complementary strengths for language models (LMs). Improved performance can be obtained by model interpolation, which is, however, a sub-optimal two-step integration of discrete and neur…
Although with progress in introducing auxiliary amortized inference models, learning discrete latent variable models is still challenging. In this paper, we show that the annoying difficulty of obtaining reliable stochastic gradients for the inference model and the drawback of indirectly optimizing…
Two important sequence tasks are sequence modeling and labeling. Sequence modeling involves determining the probabilities of sequences, e.g. language modeling. It is still difficult to improve language modeling with additional relevant tags, e.g. part-of-speech (POS) tags. For sequence labeling, it…
In this paper, we develop conditional random field (CRF) based single-stage (SS) acoustic modeling with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) inspired state topology, which is called CTC-CRF for short. CTC-CRF is conceptually simple, which basically implements a CRF layer on top of features ge…
Conditional random fields (CRFs) have been shown to be one of the most successful approaches to sequence labeling. Various linear-chain neural CRFs (NCRFs) are developed to implement the non-linear node potentials in CRFs, but still keeping the linear-chain hidden structure. In this paper, we propos…
Trans-dimensional random field language models (TRF LMs) where sentences are modeled as a collection of random fields, have shown close performance with LSTM LMs in speech recognition and are computationally more efficient in inference. However, the training efficiency of neural TRF LMs is not satis…
Dialog state tracking (DST) is a crucial component in a task-oriented dialog system for conversational information access. A common practice in current dialog systems is to define the dialog state by a set of slot-value pairs. Such representation of dialog states and the slot-filling based DST have…
State-of-the-art i-vector based speaker verification relies on variants of Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) for discriminant analysis. We are mainly motivated by the recent work of the joint Bayesian (JB) method, which is originally proposed for discriminant analysis in face verific…