Building Robust Spoken Language Understanding by Cross Attention between Phoneme Sequence and ASR Hypothesis

Building Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) robust to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) errors is an essential issue for various voice-enabled virtual assistants. Considering that most ASR errors are caused by phonetic confusion between similar-sounding expressions, intuitively, leveraging the phoneme sequence of speech can complement ASR hypothesis and enhance the robustness of SLU. This paper proposes a novel model with Cross Attention for SLU (denoted as CASLU). The cross attention block is devised to catch the fine-grained interactions between phoneme and word embeddings in order to make the joint representations catch the phonetic and semantic features of input simultaneously and for overcoming the ASR errors in downstream natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted on three datasets, showing the effectiveness and competitiveness of our approach. Additionally, We also validate the universality of CASLU and prove its complementarity when combining with other robust SLU techniques.

SECaps: A Sequence Enhanced Capsule Model for Charge Prediction

Automatic charge prediction aims to predict appropriate final charges according to the fact descriptions for a given criminal case. Automatic charge pre-diction plays an important role in assisting judges and lawyers to improve the effi-ciency of legal decisions, and thus has received much attention. Nevertheless, most existing works on automatic charge prediction perform adequately on those high-frequency charges but are not yet capable of predicting few-shot charges with lim-ited cases. On the other hand, some works have shown the benefits of capsule net-work, which is a powerful technique. This motivates us to propose a Sequence En-hanced Capsule model, dubbed as SECaps model, to relieve this problem. More specifically, we propose a new basic structure, seq-caps layer, to enhance capsule by taking sequence information in to account. In addition, we construct our SE-Caps model by making use of seq-caps layer. Comparing the state-of-the-art meth-ods, our SECaps model achieves 4.5% and 6.4% F1 promotion in two real-world datasets, Criminal-S and Criminal-L, respectively. The experimental results consis-tently demonstrate the superiorities and competitiveness of our proposed model.