Outlier Detection for Improved Data Quality and Diversity in Dialog Systems Stefan Larson Anish Mahendran Andrew Lee Jonathan K. Kummerfeld Parker Hill Michael A. Laurenzano Johann Hauswald Lingjia Tang Jason Mars Clinc, Inc. Ann Arbor, MI, USA fstefan,anish,andrew,
[email protected] fparkerhh,mike,johann,lingjia,
[email protected] Abstract amples in a dataset that are atypical, provides a means of approaching the questions of correctness In a corpus of data, outliers are either errors: and diversity, but has mainly been studied at the mistakes in the data that are counterproduc- document level (Guthrie et al., 2008; Zhuang et al., tive, or are unique: informative samples that improve model robustness. Identifying out- 2017), whereas texts in dialog systems are often no liers can lead to better datasets by (1) remov- more than a few sentences in length. ing noise in datasets and (2) guiding collection We propose a novel approach that uses sen- of additional data to fill gaps. However, the tence embeddings to detect outliers in a corpus of problem of detecting both outlier types has re- short texts. We rank samples based on their dis- ceived relatively little attention in NLP, partic- tance from the mean embedding of the corpus and ularly for dialog systems. We introduce a sim- consider samples farthest from the mean outliers. ple and effective technique for detecting both erroneous and unique samples in a corpus of Outliers come in two varieties: (1) errors, sen- short texts using neural sentence embeddings tences that have been mislabeled whose inclusion combined with distance-based outlier detec- in the dataset would be detrimental to model per- tion.