Language Control in Robotics

For robots performing a assistive tasks for the humans, it is crucial to synchronize their speech with their motions, in order to achieve natural and effective human-robot interaction. When a robot's speech is out of sync with their motions, it can cause confusion, frustration, and misinterpretation of the robot's intended meaning. Humans are accustomed to using both verbal and nonverbal cues to understand and coordinate with each other, and robots that can align their speech with their actions can tap into this natural mode of communication. In this research, we propose a language controller for robots to control the pace, tone, and pauses of their speech along with it's motion in the trajectory. The robot's speed is adjusted using an admittance controller based on the force input from the user, and the robot's speech speed is modulated using phase-vocoders.

KEPLET: Knowledge-Enhanced Pretrained Language Model with Topic Entity Awareness

In recent years, Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown their superiority by pre-training on unstructured text corpus and then fine-tuning on downstream tasks. On entity-rich textual resources like Wikipedia, Knowledge-Enhanced PLMs (KEPLMs) incorporate the interactions between tokens and mentioned entities in pre-training, and are thus more effective on entity-centric tasks such as entity linking and relation classification. Although exploiting Wikipedia's rich structures to some extent, conventional KEPLMs still neglect a unique layout of the corpus where each Wikipedia page is around a topic entity (identified by the page URL and shown in the page title). In this paper, we demonstrate that KEPLMs without incorporating the topic entities will lead to insufficient entity interaction and biased (relation) word semantics. We thus propose KEPLET, a novel Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained LanguagE model with Topic entity awareness. In an end-to-end manner, KEPLET identifies where to add the topic entity's information in a Wikipedia sentence, fuses such information into token and mentioned entities representations, and supervises the network learning, through which it takes topic entities back into consideration. Experiments demonstrated the generality and superiority of KEPLET which was applied to two representative KEPLMs, achieving significant improvements on four entity-centric tasks.

An Avatar Robot Overlaid with the 3D Human Model of a Remote Operator

Although telepresence assistive robots have made significant progress, they still lack the sense of realism and physical presence of the remote operator. This results in a lack of trust and adoption of such robots. In this paper, we introduce an Avatar Robot System which is a mixed real/virtual robotic system that physically interacts with a person in proximity of the robot. The robot structure is overlaid with the 3D model of the remote caregiver and visualized through Augmented Reality (AR). In this way, the person receives haptic feedback as the robot touches him/her. We further present an Optimal Non-Iterative Alignment solver that solves for the optimally aligned pose of 3D Human model to the robot (shoulder to the wrist non-iteratively). The proposed alignment solver is stateless, achieves optimal alignment and faster than the baseline solvers (demonstrated in our evaluations). We also propose an evaluation framework that quantifies the alignment quality of the solvers through multifaceted metrics. We show that our solver can consistently produce poses with similar or superior alignments as IK-based baselines without their potential drawbacks.

CLICKER: Attention-Based Cross-Lingual Commonsense Knowledge Transfer

Recent advances in cross-lingual commonsense reasoning (CSR) are facilitated by the development of multilingual pre-trained models (mPTMs). While mPTMs show the potential to encode commonsense knowledge for different languages, transferring commonsense knowledge learned in large-scale English corpus to other languages is challenging. To address this problem, we propose the attention-based Cross-LIngual Commonsense Knowledge transfER (CLICKER) framework, which minimizes the performance gaps between English and non-English languages in commonsense question-answering tasks. CLICKER effectively improves commonsense reasoning for non-English languages by differentiating non-commonsense knowledge from commonsense knowledge. Experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate that CLICKER achieves remarkable improvements in the cross-lingual CSR task for languages other than English.

Self-Aware Feedback-Based Self-Learning in Large-Scale Conversational AI

Self-learning paradigms in large-scale conversational AI agents tend to leverage user feedback in bridging between what they say and what they mean. However, such learning, particularly in Markov-based query rewriting systems have far from addressed the impact of these models on future training where successive feedback is inevitably contingent on the rewrite itself, especially in a continually updating environment. In this paper, we explore the consequences of this inherent lack of self-awareness towards impairing the model performance, ultimately resulting in both Type I and II errors over time. To that end, we propose augmenting the Markov Graph construction with a superposition-based adjacency matrix. Here, our method leverages an induced stochasticity to reactively learn a locally-adaptive decision boundary based on the performance of the individual rewrites in a bi-variate beta setting. We also surface a data augmentation strategy that leverages template-based generation in abridging complex conversation hierarchies of dialogs so as to simplify the learning process. All in all, we demonstrate that our self-aware model improves the overall PR-AUC by 27.45%, achieves a relative defect reduction of up to 31.22%, and is able to adapt quicker to changes in global preferences across a large number of customers.

A Vocabulary-Free Multilingual Neural Tokenizer for End-to-End Task Learning

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in low-resource languages, leading models to produce suboptimal representations. Additionally, the dependency on a fixed vocabulary limits the subword models' adaptability across languages and domains. In this work, we propose a vocabulary-free neural tokenizer by distilling segmentation information from heuristic-based subword tokenization. We pre-train our character-based tokenizer by processing unique words from multilingual corpus, thereby extensively increasing word diversity across languages. Unlike the predefined and fixed vocabularies in subword methods, our tokenizer allows end-to-end task learning, resulting in optimal task-specific tokenization. The experimental results show that replacing the subword tokenizer with our neural tokenizer consistently improves performance on multilingual (NLI) and code-switching (sentiment analysis) tasks, with larger gains in low-resource languages. Additionally, our neural tokenizer exhibits a robust performance on downstream tasks when adversarial noise is present (typos and misspelling), further increasing the initial improvements over statistical subword tokenizers.

Query Expansion and Entity Weighting for Query Reformulation Retrieval in Voice Assistant Systems

Voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have become increasingly popular worldwide. However, linguistic variations, variability of speech patterns, ambient acoustic conditions, and other such factors are often correlated with the assistants misinterpreting the user's query. In order to provide better customer experience, retrieval based query reformulation (QR) systems are widely used to reformulate those misinterpreted user queries. Current QR systems typically focus on neural retrieval model training or direct entities retrieval for the reformulating. However, these methods rarely focus on query expansion and entity weighting simultaneously, which may limit the scope and accuracy of the query reformulation retrieval. In this work, we propose a novel Query Expansion and Entity Weighting method (QEEW), which leverages the relationships between entities in the entity catalog (consisting of users' queries, assistant's responses, and corresponding entities), to enhance the query reformulation performance. Experiments on Alexa annotated data demonstrate that QEEW improves all top precision metrics, particularly 6% improvement in top10 precision, compared with baselines not using query expansion and weighting; and more than 5% improvement in top10 precision compared with other baselines using query expansion and weighting.

Incremental user embedding modeling for personalized text classification

Individual user profiles and interaction histories play a significant role in providing customized experiences in real-world applications such as chatbots, social media, retail, and education. Adaptive user representation learning by utilizing user personalized information has become increasingly challenging due to ever-growing history data. In this work, we propose an incremental user embedding modeling approach, in which embeddings of user's recent interaction histories are dynamically integrated into the accumulated history vectors via a transformer encoder. This modeling paradigm allows us to create generalized user representations in a consecutive manner and also alleviate the challenges of data management. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by applying it to a personalized multi-class classification task based on the Reddit dataset, and achieve 9% and 30% relative improvement on prediction accuracy over a baseline system for two experiment settings through appropriate comment history encoding and task modeling.

VAE based Text Style Transfer with Pivot Words Enhancement Learning

Text Style Transfer (TST) aims to alter the underlying style of the source text to another specific style while keeping the same content. Due to the scarcity of high-quality parallel training data, unsupervised learning has become a trending direction for TST tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel VAE based Text Style Transfer with pivOt Words Enhancement leaRning (VT-STOWER) method which utilizes Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and external style embeddings to learn semantics and style distribution jointly. Additionally, we introduce pivot words learning, which is applied to learn decisive words for a specific style and thereby further improve the overall performance of the style transfer. The proposed VT-STOWER can be scaled to different TST scenarios given very limited and non-parallel training data with a novel and flexible style strength control mechanism. Experiments demonstrate that the VT-STOWER outperforms the state-of-the-art on sentiment, formality, and code-switching TST tasks.

LSTM-based Whisper Detection

This article presents a whisper speech detector in the far-field domain. The proposed system consists of a long-short term memory (LSTM) neural network trained on log-filterbank energy (LFBE) acoustic features. This model is trained and evaluated on recordings of human interactions with voice-controlled, far-field devices in whisper and normal phonation modes. We compare multiple inference approaches for utterance-level classification by examining trajectories of the LSTM posteriors. In addition, we engineer a set of features based on the signal characteristics inherent to whisper speech, and evaluate their effectiveness in further separating whisper from normal speech. A benchmarking of these features using multilayer perceptrons (MLP) and LSTMs suggests that the proposed features, in combination with LFBE features, can help us further improve our classifiers. We prove that, with enough data, the LSTM model is indeed as capable of learning whisper characteristics from LFBE features alone com- pared to a simpler MLP model that uses both LFBE and features engineered for separating whisper and normal speech. In addition, we prove that the LSTM classifiers accuracy can be further improved with the incorporation of the proposed engineered features.