RecQR: Using Recommendation Systems for Query Reformulation to correct unseen errors in spoken dialog systems

As spoken dialog systems like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant become widespread, it becomes apparent that relying solely on global, one-size-fits-all models of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Entity Resolution (ER), is inadequate for delivering a friction-less customer experience. To address this issue, Query Reformulation (QR) has emerged as a crucial technique for personalizing these systems and reducing customer friction. However, existing QR models, trained on personal rephrases in history face a critical drawback - they are unable to reformulate unseen queries to unseen targets. To alleviate this, we present RecQR, a novel system based on collaborative filters, designed to reformulate unseen defective requests to target requests that a customer may never have requested for in the past. RecQR anticipates a customer’s future requests and rewrites them using state of the art, large-scale, collaborative filtering and query reformulation models. Based on experiments we find that it reduces errors by nearly 40% (relative) on the reformulated utterances.