Optimizing NLU Reranking Using Entity Resolution Signals in Multi-domain Dialog Systems

Abstract

In dialog systems, the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component typically makes the interpretation decision (including domain, intent and slots) for an utterance before the mentioned entities are resolved. This may result in intent classification and slot tagging errors. In this work, we propose to leverage Entity Resolution (ER) features in NLU reranking and introduce a novel loss term based on ER signals to better learn model weights in the reranking framework. In addition, for a multi-domain dialog scenario, we propose a score distribution matching method to ensure scores generated by the NLU reranking models for different domains are properly calibrated. In offline experiments, we demonstrate our proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline model on both single-domain and cross-domain evaluations.