Learning Spoken Language Representations with Neural Lattice Language Modeling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural lattice language model framework that pre-trains on recognition-generated lattices to improve spoken language understanding, outperforming traditional models on intent detection and dialogue tasks.

Contribution

It extends language model pre-training to recognition lattices, enabling better spoken language understanding with a novel two-stage pre-training approach.

Findings

Outperforms strong baselines on spoken intent detection

Efficient two-stage pre-training reduces speech data requirements

Provides contextualized representations for spoken language tasks

Abstract

Pre-trained language models have achieved huge improvement on many NLP tasks. However, these methods are usually designed for written text, so they do not consider the properties of spoken language. Therefore, this paper aims at generalizing the idea of language model pre-training to lattices generated by recognition systems. We propose a framework that trains neural lattice language models to provide contextualized representations for spoken language understanding tasks. The proposed two-stage pre-training approach reduces the demands of speech data and has better efficiency. Experiments on intent detection and dialogue act recognition datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms strong baselines when evaluated on spoken inputs. The code is available at https://github.com/MiuLab/Lattice-ELMo.