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Providing voice assistants the ability to navigate multi-turn conversations is a challenging problem. Handling multi-turn interactions requires the system to understand various conversational use-cases, such as steering, intent carryover, disfluencies, entity carryover, and repair. The complexity of this problem is compounded by the fact that these use-cases mix with each other, often appearing simultaneously in natural language. This work proposes a non-autoregressive query rewriting architecture that can handle not only the five aforementioned tasks, but also complex compositions of these use-cases. We show that our proposed model has competitive single task performance compared to the baseline approach, and even outperforms a fine-tuned T5 model in use-case compositions, despite being 15 times smaller in parameters and 25 times faster in latency.

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Interspeech Conference 2023

Apple is sponsoring the Interspeech Conference, which will take place in person from August 20 to 24 in Dublin, Ireland. Interspeech is the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing. Below is the schedule of Apple-sponsored workshops and events at Interspeech 2023.

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CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues

Anaphora and ellipses are two common phenomena in dialogues. Without resolving referring expressions and information omission, dialogue systems may fail to generate consistent and coherent responses. Traditionally, anaphora is resolved by coreference resolution and ellipses by query rewrite. In this work, we propose a novel joint learning framework of modeling coreference resolution and query rewriting for complex, multi-turn dialogue…
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