An Empirical Evaluation of Encoder Architectures for Fast Real-Time Long Conversational Understanding

Analyzing long text data such as customer call transcripts is a cost-intensive and tedious task. Machine learning methods, namely Transformers, are leveraged to model agent-customer interactions. Unfortunately, Transformers adhere to fixed-length architectures and their self-attention mechanism scales quadratically with input length. Such limitations make it challenging to leverage traditional Transformers for long sequence tasks, such as conversational understanding, especially in real-time use cases. In this paper we explore and evaluate recently proposed efficient Transformer variants (e.g. Performer, Reformer) and a CNN-based architecture for real-time and near real-time long conversational understanding tasks. We show that CNN-based models are dynamic, ~2.6x faster to train, ~80% faster inference and ~72% more memory efficient compared to Transformers on average. Additionally, we evaluate the CNN model using the Long Range Arena benchmark to demonstrate competitiveness in general long document analysis.

Effective Proxy for Human Labeling: Ensemble Disagreement Scores in Large Language Models for Industrial NLP

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capability to generalize across a large number of NLP tasks. For industry applications, it is imperative to assess the performance of the LLM on unlabeled production data from time to time to validate for a real-world setting. Human labeling to assess model error requires considerable expense and time delay. Here we demonstrate that ensemble disagreement scores work well as a proxy for human labeling for language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned settings, per our evaluation on keyphrase extraction (KPE) task. We measure fidelity of the results by comparing to true error measured from human labeled ground truth. We contrast with the alternative of using another LLM as a source of machine labels, or silver labels. Results across various languages and domains show disagreement scores provide a better estimation of model performance with mean average error (MAE) as low as 0.4% and on average 13.8% better than using silver labels.

Compressing Cross-Lingual Multi-Task Models at Qualtrics

Experience management is an emerging business area where organizations focus on understanding the feedback of customers and employees in order to improve their end-to-end experiences. This results in a unique set of machine learning problems to help understand how people feel, discover issues they care about, and find which actions need to be taken on data that are different in content and distribution from traditional NLP domains. In this paper, we present a case study of building text analysis applications that perform multiple classification tasks efficiently in 12 languages in the nascent business area of experience management. In order to scale up modern ML methods on experience data, we leverage cross lingual and multi-task modeling techniques to consolidate our models into a single deployment to avoid overhead. We also make use of model compression and model distillation to reduce overall inference latency and hardware cost to the level acceptable for business needs while maintaining model prediction quality. Our findings show that multi-task modeling improves task performance for a subset of experience management tasks in both XLM-R and mBert architectures. Among the compressed architectures we explored, we found that MiniLM achieved the best compression/performance tradeoff. Our case study demonstrates a speedup of up to 15.61x with 2.60% average task degradation (or 3.29x speedup with 1.71% degradation) and estimated savings of 44% over using the original full-size model. These results demonstrate a successful scaling up of text classification for the challenging new area of ML for experience management.