Recently there have been efforts to introduce new benchmark tasks for spoken language understanding (SLU), like semantic parsing. In this paper, we describe our proposed spoken semantic parsing system for the quality track (Track 1) in Spoken Language Understanding Grand Challenge which is part of ICASSP Signal Processing Grand Challenge 2023. We experiment with both end-to-end and pipeline systems for this task. Strong automatic speech recognition (ASR) models like Whisper and pretrained Language models (LM) like BART are utilized inside our SLU framework to boost performance. We also investigate the output level combination of various models to get an exact match accuracy of 80.8, which won the 1st place at the challenge.

Most human interactions occur in the form of spoken conversations where the semantic meaning of a given utterance depends on the context. Each utterance in spoken conversation can be represented by many semantic and speaker attributes, and there has been an interest in building Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems for automatically predicting these attributes. Recent work has shown that incorporating dialogue history can help advance SLU performance. However, separate models are used for each SLU task, leading to an increase in inference time and computation cost. Motivated by this, we aim to ask: can we jointly model all the SLU tasks while incorporating context to facilitate low-latency and lightweight inference? To answer this, we propose a novel model architecture that learns dialog context to jointly predict the intent, dialog act, speaker role, and emotion for the spoken utterance. Note that our joint prediction is based on an autoregressive model and we need to decide the prediction order of dialog attributes, which is not trivial. To mitigate the issue, we also propose an order agnostic training method. Our experiments show that our joint model achieves similar results to task-specific classifiers and can effectively integrate dialog context to further improve the SLU performance.

This paper presents BERT-CTC, a novel formulation of end-to-end speech recognition that adapts BERT for connectionist temporal classification (CTC). Our formulation relaxes the conditional independence assumptions used in conventional CTC and incorporates linguistic knowledge through the explicit output dependency obtained by BERT contextual embedding. BERT-CTC attends to the full contexts of the input and hypothesized output sequences via the self-attention mechanism. This mechanism encourages a model to learn inner/inter-dependencies between the audio and token representations while maintaining CTC's training efficiency. During inference, BERT-CTC combines a mask-predict algorithm with CTC decoding, which iteratively refines an output sequence. The experimental results reveal that BERT-CTC improves over conventional approaches across variations in speaking styles and languages. Finally, we show that the semantic representations in BERT-CTC are beneficial towards downstream spoken language understanding tasks.

Collecting sufficient labeled data for spoken language understanding (SLU) is expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies achieved promising results by using pre-trained models in low-resource scenarios. Inspired by this, we aim to ask: which (if any) pre-training strategies can improve performance across SLU benchmarks? To answer this question, we employ four types of pre-trained models and their combinations for SLU. We leverage self-supervised speech and language models (LM) pre-trained on large quantities of unpaired data to extract strong speech and text representations. We also explore using supervised models pre-trained on larger external automatic speech recognition (ASR) or SLU corpora. We conduct extensive experiments on the SLU Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark and observe self-supervised pre-trained models to be more powerful, with pre-trained LM and speech models being most beneficial for the Sentiment Analysis and Named Entity Recognition task, respectively.

Knowledge Graphs are increasingly becoming popular for a variety of downstream tasks like Question Answering and Information Retrieval. However, the Knowledge Graphs are often incomplete, thus leading to poor performance. As a result, there has been a lot of interest in the task of Knowledge Base Completion. More recently, Graph Neural Networks have been used to capture structural information inherently stored in these Knowledge Graphs and have been shown to achieve SOTA performance across a variety of datasets. In this survey, we understand the various strengths and weaknesses of the proposed methodology and try to find new exciting research problems in this area that require further investigation.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) extracted from text sources are often noisy and lead to poor performance in downstream application tasks such as KG-based question answering.While much of the recent activity is focused on addressing the sparsity of KGs by using embeddings for inferring new facts, the issue of cleaning up of noise in KGs through KG refinement task is not as actively studied. Most successful techniques for KG refinement make use of inference rules and reasoning over ontologies. Barring a few exceptions, embeddings do not make use of ontological information, and their performance in KG refinement task is not well understood. In this paper, we present a KG refinement framework called IterefinE which iteratively combines the two techniques - one which uses ontological information and inferences rules, PSL-KGI, and the KG embeddings such as ComplEx and ConvE which do not. As a result, IterefinE is able to exploit not only the ontological information to improve the quality of predictions, but also the power of KG embeddings which (implicitly) perform longer chains of reasoning. The IterefinE framework, operates in a co-training mode and results in explicit type-supervised embedding of the refined KG from PSL-KGI which we call as TypeE-X. Our experiments over a range of KG benchmarks show that the embeddings that we produce are able to reject noisy facts from KG and at the same time infer higher quality new facts resulting in up to 9% improvement of overall weighted F1 score