Transforming NLU with Babylon: A Case Study in Development of Real-time, Edge-Efficient, Multi-Intent Translation System for Automated Drive-Thru Ordering

Real-time conversational AI agents face challenges in performing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in dynamic, outdoor environments like automated drive-thru systems. These settings require NLU models to handle background noise, diverse accents, and multi-intent queries while operating under strict latency and memory constraints on edge devices. Additionally, robustness to errors from upstream Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is crucial, as ASR outputs in these environments are often noisy. We introduce Babylon, a transformer-based architecture that tackles NLU as an intent translation task, converting natural language inputs into sequences of regular language units ('transcodes') that encode both intents and slot information. This formulation allows Babylon to manage multi-intent scenarios in a single dialogue turn. Furthermore, Babylon incorporates an LSTM-based token pooling mechanism to preprocess phoneme sequences, reducing input length and optimizing for low-latency, low-memory edge deployment. This also helps mitigate inaccuracies in ASR outputs, enhancing system robustness. While this work focuses on drive-thru ordering, Babylon's design extends to similar noise-prone scenarios, for e.g. ticketing kiosks. Our experiments show that Babylon achieves significantly better accuracy-latency-memory footprint trade-offs over typically employed NMT models like Flan-T5 and BART, demonstrating its effectiveness for real-time NLU in edge deployment settings.

ToxVis: Enabling Interpretability of Implicit vs. Explicit Toxicity Detection Models with Interactive Visualization

The rise of hate speech on online platforms has led to an urgent need for effective content moderation. However, the subjective and multi-faceted nature of hateful online content, including implicit hate speech, poses significant challenges to human moderators and content moderation systems. To address this issue, we developed ToxVis, a visually interactive and explainable tool for classifying hate speech into three categories: implicit, explicit, and non-hateful. We fine-tuned two transformer-based models using RoBERTa, XLNET, and GPT-3 and used deep learning interpretation techniques to provide explanations for the classification results. ToxVis enables users to input potentially hateful text and receive a classification result along with a visual explanation of which words contributed most to the decision. By making the classification process explainable, ToxVis provides a valuable tool for understanding the nuances of hateful content and supporting more effective content moderation. Our research contributes to the growing body of work aimed at mitigating the harms caused by online hate speech and demonstrates the potential for combining state-of-the-art natural language processing models with interpretable deep learning techniques to address this critical issue. Finally, ToxVis can serve as a resource for content moderators, social media platforms, and researchers working to combat the spread of hate speech online.