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Talking to Your TV: Context-Aware Voice Search with Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks

Published: 06 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We tackle the novel problem of navigational voice queries posed against an entertainment system, where viewers interact with a voice-enabled remote controller to specify the TV program to watch. This is a difficult problem for several reasons: such queries are short, even shorter than comparable voice queries in other domains, which offers fewer opportunities for deciphering user intent. Furthermore, ambiguity is exacerbated by underlying speech recognition errors. We address these challenges by integrating word- and character-level query representations and by modeling voice search sessions to capture the contextual dependencies in query sequences. Both are accomplished with a probabilistic framework in which recurrent and feedforward neural network modules are organized in a hierarchical manner. From a raw dataset of 32M voice queries from 2.5M viewers on the Comcast Xfinity X1 entertainment system, we extracted data to train and test our models. We demonstrate the benefits of our hybrid representation and context-aware model, which significantly outperforms competitive baselines that use learning to rank as well as neural networks.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)A Survey on Modern Deep Neural Network for Traffic Prediction: Trends, Methods and ChallengesIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2020.3001195(1-1)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)Challenges and Opportunities in Understanding Spoken Queries Directed at Modern Entertainment PlatformsProceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3331184.3331433(1375-1376)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2019
  • (2019)Yelling at Your TVProceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3331184.3331271(853-856)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2019
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cover image ACM Conferences
CIKM '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
November 2017
2604 pages
ISBN:9781450349185
DOI:10.1145/3132847
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 06 November 2017

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Author Tags

  1. context modeling
  2. lstm
  3. navigational voice queries
  4. voice search sessions

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CIKM '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 171 of 855 submissions, 20%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,861 of 8,427 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)A Survey on Modern Deep Neural Network for Traffic Prediction: Trends, Methods and ChallengesIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2020.3001195(1-1)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2019)Challenges and Opportunities in Understanding Spoken Queries Directed at Modern Entertainment PlatformsProceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3331184.3331433(1375-1376)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2019
  • (2019)Yelling at Your TVProceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3331184.3331271(853-856)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2019
  • (2019)TV Channels in Your Pocket! Linking Smart Pockets to Smart TVsProceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video10.1145/3317697.3325119(193-198)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2019
  • (2019)HoverInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.03.012129:C(95-107)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
  • (2018)Multi-Task Learning with Neural Networks for Voice Query Understanding on an Entertainment PlatformProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining10.1145/3219819.3219870(636-645)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2018
  • (2018)What Do Viewers Say to Their TVs?The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3209978.3210140(1213-1216)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2018

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