Conversational AI

Voice assistant accessibility is generally overlooked as today’s spoken dialogue systems are trained on huge corpora to help them understand the ‘average’ user. This raises frustrating barriers for certain user groups as their speech shifts from the average. People with dementia pause more frequently mid-sentence for example, and people with hearing impairments may mispronounce words learned post-diagnosis

Large self-supervised models are effective feature extractors, but their application is challenging under on-device budget constraints and biased dataset collection, especially in keyword spotting. To address this, we proposed a knowledge distillation-based self-supervised speech representation learning (S3RL) architecture for on-device keyword spotting. Our approach used a teacher-student framework to

Popular models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA), including semantic parsing and End-to-End (E2E) models, decode into a constrained space of KG relations. Al-though E2E models accommodate novel entities at test-time, this constraint means they cannot access novel relations, requiring expensive and time-consuming retraining whenever a new relation is added to the KG. We propose KG-Flex, a new

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of performing zero-shot closed-book question answering tasks, based on their internal knowl-edge stored in parameters during pre-training. However, such internalized knowledge might be insufficient and incorrect, which could lead LLMs to generate factually wrong answers. Furthermore, fine-tuning LLMs to update their knowledge is expensive. To this end, we pro-pose

Recent NLP literature pays little attention to the robustness of toxicity language predictors, while these systems are most likely to be used in adversarial contexts. This paper presents a novel adversarial attack, ToxicTrap, introducing small word-level perturbations to fool SOTA text classifiers to predict toxic text samples as benign. ToxicTrap exploits greedy based search strategies to enable fast and