Learning Spoken Language Representations with Neural Lattice Language Modeling (2007.02629v2)

Abstract: Pre-trained LLMs 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 LLM pre-training to lattices generated by recognition systems. We propose a framework that trains neural lattice LLMs 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.