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Main Authors: Varzaneh, Mostafa, Voladoddi, Pooja, Bakshi, Tanmay, Gunturi, Uma
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15372
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author Varzaneh, Mostafa
Voladoddi, Pooja
Bakshi, Tanmay
Gunturi, Uma
author_facet Varzaneh, Mostafa
Voladoddi, Pooja
Bakshi, Tanmay
Gunturi, Uma
contents 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.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Transforming NLU with Babylon: A Case Study in Development of Real-time, Edge-Efficient, Multi-Intent Translation System for Automated Drive-Thru Ordering
Varzaneh, Mostafa
Voladoddi, Pooja
Bakshi, Tanmay
Gunturi, Uma
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
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.
title Transforming NLU with Babylon: A Case Study in Development of Real-time, Edge-Efficient, Multi-Intent Translation System for Automated Drive-Thru Ordering
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15372