User-Initiated Repetition-Based Recovery in Multi-Utterance Dialogue Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a system enabling users to correct speech recognition errors in virtual assistants by repeating misunderstood words, using a neural network to rewrite queries and improve understanding.

Contribution

It presents an end-to-end attention pointer network that effectively rewrites queries based on user repetitions, outperforming rule-based methods.

Findings

Reduces Word Error Rate by 19% relative at 2% false alarm rate

Outperforms rule-based baseline in query rewriting accuracy

Demonstrates effectiveness of repetition-based recovery in dialogue systems

Abstract

Recognition errors are common in human communication. Similar errors often lead to unwanted behaviour in dialogue systems or virtual assistants. In human communication, we can recover from them by repeating misrecognized words or phrases; however in human-machine communication this recovery mechanism is not available. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap and present a system that allows a user to correct speech recognition errors in a virtual assistant by repeating misunderstood words. When a user repeats part of the phrase the system rewrites the original query to incorporate the correction. This rewrite allows the virtual assistant to understand the original query successfully. We present an end-to-end 2-step attention pointer network that can generate the the rewritten query by merging together the incorrectly understood utterance with the correction follow-up. We evaluate the model on data collected for this task and compare the proposed model to a rule-based baseline and a standard pointer network. We show that rewriting the original query is an effective way to handle repetition-based recovery and that the proposed model outperforms the rule based baseline, reducing Word Error Rate by 19% relative at 2% False Alarm Rate on annotated data.