Title: Just ASK: Building an Architecture for Extensible Self-Service Spoken Language Understanding,
Abstract: This paper presents the design of the machine learning architecture that
underlies the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) a large scale Spoken Language
Understanding (SLU) Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables developers to
extend the capabilities of Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa. At Amazon, the
infrastructure powers over 25,000 skills deployed through the ASK, as well as
AWS's Amazon Lex SLU Service. The ASK emphasizes flexibility, predictability
and a rapid iteration cycle for third party developers. It imposes inductive
biases that allow it to learn robust SLU models from extremely small and sparse
datasets and, in doing so, removes significant barriers to entry for software
developers and dialogue systems researchers.