multilingual ai teams

Abstract: Natural Language Understanding (NLU) plays a crucial role in various applications, yet its performance suffers from weaknesses in handling the complexities of human languages, ranging from lexical ambiguity to high-level reasoning difficulties. Analyzing errors across diverse linguistic phenomena is crucial for NLU improvement, as it will help humans get insights to comprehensively assess models' limitations and capabilities, so optimizing models' generalization. Notably, several benchmarks contain diagnostics datasets designed for investigation and fine-grained error analysis. When highlighting the gaps in the state-of-the-art, we noted that there is no naming convention for macro and micro categories or even a standard set of linguistic phenomena that should be covered. To overcome this gap, we propose an initial hierarchy for Cross-Lingual NLU error analysis. Moreover, we propose a methodology to create an NLI hierarchical framework and applied a case study on Arabic NLU. Moreover, this paper introduces E-CONAN diagnostics dataset, a freely available dataset manually-annotated with coarse-grained and fine-grained categories based on our proposed Arabic hierarchy. E-CONAN dataset helps NLU designers better understand their models by doing error analysis and in-depth investigation. We used E-CONAN to investigate the performance of 9 pretrained language models and 5 LLMs. Results indicate that LLMs outperform pretrained models in world knowledge and commonsense reasoning macro-category, and underperform pretrained models in syntactic macro-category. Moreover, the hardest phenomena for all models is Reasoning, and the easiest phenomena for all pretrained models is Syntactic, and the easiest for LLMs is Lexico-Syntactic.

Abstract: Generally, most voice agents are cascaded systems, i.e., an ASR model transcribes the caller's audio, a language model reads the transcript and decides what to say and which backend tools to call, and a TTS model speaks the reply. Nearly all of the decision making happens in the language model, but existing evaluations measure it either too broadly or too narrowly. End-to-end voice benchmarks score the full pipeline, so recognition errors and model errors mix into a single number. LLM benchmarks isolate the model but they do not evaluate what makes real phone calls hard, such as transcription issues, caller's voice being split across messages and the requirement that replies follow the language and script specified. We introduce the Multi-Turn Voice Agent Benchmark (MTVA-Bench), which evaluates the language model on the same conditions it faces inside a cascaded system. The caller is played by an LLM following a set of rubrics and tool calls are answered by a mock backend which responds to the arguments the model actually sent. The benchmark contains 49 agents working across 490 reviewed scenarios and supports 7 languages. Scoring is a combination of deterministic checks on tool calls with two LLM judges, one that scores scenario specific rules and one that grades conversation quality without access to the task. Both judges must cite specific messages from the transcript. Task and conversation scores are weighted equally, since a call can complete its task and still go badly for the caller. In a seven-model study, six of the models select the correct tool within 6.4 points of one another, but their overall scores span 24.4 points. Most of the gap comes from argument values, action ordering, rule compliance, and what the model says around its tool calls.