Voice Assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant typically use a two-stage Spoken Language Understanding pipeline; first, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) component to process customer speech and generate text transcriptions, followed by a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component to map transcriptions to an actionable hypothesis. An end-to-end (E2E) system that goes directly from speech to a hypothesis is a more attractive option. These systems were shown to be smaller, faster, and better optimized. However, they require massive amounts of end-to-end training data and in addition, don't take advantage of the already available ASR and NLU training data. In this work, we propose an E2E system that is designed to jointly train on multiple speech-to-text tasks, such as ASR (speech-transcription) and SLU (speech-hypothesis), and text-to-text tasks, such as NLU (text-hypothesis). We call this the Audio-Text All-Task (AT-AT) Model and we show that it beats the performance of E2E models trained on individual tasks, especially ones trained on limited data. We show this result on an internal music dataset and two public datasets, FluentSpeech and SNIPS Audio, where we achieve state-of-the-art results. Since our model can process both speech and text input sequences and learn to predict a target sequence, it also allows us to do zero-shot E2E SLU by training on only text-hypothesis data (without any speech) from a new domain. We evaluate this ability of our model on the Facebook TOP dataset and set a new benchmark for zeroshot E2E performance. We release the audio data collected for the TOP dataset for future research.

We propose the task of unsupervised morphological paradigm completion.Given only raw text and a lemma list, the task consists of generating the morphological paradigms, i.e., all inflected forms, of the lemmas.From a natural language processing (NLP) perspective, this is a challenging unsupervised task, and high-performing systems have the potential to improve tools for low-resource languages or to assist linguistic annotators.From a cognitive science perspective, this can shed light on how children acquire morphological knowledge.We further introduce a system for the task, which generates morphological paradigms via the following steps: (i) EDIT TREE retrieval, (ii) additional lemma retrieval, (iii) paradigm size discovery, and (iv) inflection generation.We perform an evaluation on 14 typologically diverse languages.Our system outperforms trivial baselines with ease and, for some languages, even obtains a higher accuracy than minimally supervised systems. 1 Sé vigilante y confirma las otras cosas que están para morir , porque no he hallado tus obras bien acabadas delante de Dios .Acuérdate , pues , de lo que has recibido y oído ; guárdalo y arrepiéntete , pues si no velas vendré sobre ti como ladrón y no sabrás a qué hora vendré sobre ti .El vencedor será vestido de vestiduras blancas , y no borraré su nombre del libro de la vida , y confesaré su nombre delante de mi Padre y delante de sus ángeles .El que tiene oído , oiga lo que el Espíritu dice a las iglesias .

Liwei Cai, William Yang Wang. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers). 2018.