ASR-GLUE: A New Multi-task Benchmark for ASR-Robust Natural Language Understanding

Language understanding in speech-based systems have attracted much attention in recent years with the growing demand for voice interface applications. However, the robustness of natural language understanding (NLU) systems to errors introduced by automatic speech recognition (ASR) is under-examined. %To facilitate the research on ASR-robust general language understanding, In this paper, we propose ASR-GLUE benchmark, a new collection of 6 different NLU tasks for evaluating the performance of models under ASR error across 3 different levels of background noise and 6 speakers with various voice characteristics. Based on the proposed benchmark, we systematically investigate the effect of ASR error on NLU tasks in terms of noise intensity, error type and speaker variants. We further purpose two ways, correction-based method and data augmentation-based method to improve robustness of the NLU systems. Extensive experimental results and analysises show that the proposed methods are effective to some extent, but still far from human performance, demonstrating that NLU under ASR error is still very challenging and requires further research.

Learning to Augment for Data-Scarce Domain BERT Knowledge Distillation

Despite pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved appealing performance in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, they are computationally expensive to be deployed in real-time applications. A typical method is to adopt knowledge distillation to compress these large pre-trained models (teacher models) to small student models. However, for a target domain with scarce training data, the teacher can hardly pass useful knowledge to the student, which yields performance degradation for the student models. To tackle this problem, we propose a method to learn to augment for data-scarce domain BERT knowledge distillation, by learning a cross-domain manipulation scheme that automatically augments the target with the help of resource-rich source domains. Specifically, the proposed method generates samples acquired from a stationary distribution near the target data and adopts a reinforced selector to automatically refine the augmentation strategy according to the performance of the student. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on four different tasks, and for the data-scarce domains, the compressed student models even perform better than the original large teacher model, with much fewer parameters (only ${\sim}13.3\%$) when only a few labeled examples available.