Conversational AI

Retrieval accuracy is crucial to the performance of open-domain question answering (ODQA) systems. Recent work has demonstrated that dense hierarchical retrieval (DHR), which retrieves document candidates first and then relevant passages from the refined document set, can significantly outperform the single stage dense passage retriever (DPR). While effective, this approach requires document structure information

Large language models (LMs) beyond a certain scale, demonstrate the emergent capability of generating free-text rationales for their predictions via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While CoT can yield dramatically improved performance, such gains are only observed for sufficiently large LMs. Even more concerning, there is little guarantee that the generated rationales are consistent with LM’s predictions

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems such as chatbots or virtual assistants have seen a significant rise in popularity in recent times, thanks to availability of large volumes of user data. However, typical user data collected for training such models may suffer from sampling biases due to a variety of factors. In this paper, we study the impact of bias in the training data for intent classification

Research on text-to-image generation (TTI) still predominantly focuses on the English language due to the lack of annotated image-caption data in other languages; in the long run, this might widen inequitable access to TTI technology. In this work, we thus investigate multilingual TTI (termed mTTI) and the current potential of neural machine translation (NMT) to bootstrap mTTI systems. We provide two key

Leveraging representations from pre-trained transformer-based encoders achieves state-ofthe-art performance on numerous NLP tasks. Larger encoders can improve accuracy for spoken language understanding (SLU) but are challenging to use given the inference latency constraints of online systems (especially on CPU machines). We evaluate using a larger 170M parameter BERT encoder that shares representations