Ethan Selfridge

Also published as: Ethan O. Selfridge


2023

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The economic trade-offs of large language models: A case study
Kristen Howell | Gwen Christian | Pavel Fomitchov | Gitit Kehat | Julianne Marzulla | Leanne Rolston | Jadin Tredup | Ilana Zimmerman | Ethan Selfridge | Joseph Bradley
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)

Contacting customer service via chat is a common practice. Because employing customer service agents is expensive, many companies are turning to NLP that assists human agents by auto-generating responses that can be used directly or with modifications. With their ability to handle large context windows, Large Language Models (LLMs) are a natural fit for this use case. However, their efficacy must be balanced with the cost of training and serving them. This paper assesses the practical cost and impact of LLMs for the enterprise as a function of the usefulness of the responses that they generate. We present a cost framework for evaluating an NLP model’s utility for this use case and apply it to a single brand as a case study in the context of an existing agent assistance product. We compare three strategies for specializing an LLM — prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and knowledge distillation — using feedback from the brand’s customer service agents. We find that the usability of a model’s responses can make up for a large difference in inference cost for our case study brand, and we extrapolate our findings to the broader enterprise space.

2014

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MVA: The Multimodal Virtual Assistant
Michael Johnston | John Chen | Patrick Ehlen | Hyuckchul Jung | Jay Lieske | Aarthi Reddy | Ethan Selfridge | Svetlana Stoyanchev | Brant Vasilieff | Jay Wilpon
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)

2013

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Continuously Predicting and Processing Barge-in During a Live Spoken Dialogue Task
Ethan Selfridge | Iker Arizmendi | Peter Heeman | Jason Williams
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

2012

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A Temporal Simulator for Developing Turn-Taking Methods for Spoken Dialogue Systems
Ethan O. Selfridge | Peter A. Heeman
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

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Integrating Incremental Speech Recognition and POMDP-Based Dialogue Systems
Ethan O. Selfridge | Iker Arizmendi | Peter A. Heeman | Jason D. Williams
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

2011

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Proceedings of the ACL 2011 Student Session
Sasa Petrovic | Ethan Selfridge | Emily Pitler | Miles Osborne | Thamar Solorio
Proceedings of the ACL 2011 Student Session

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Stability and Accuracy in Incremental Speech Recognition
Ethan Selfridge | Iker Arizmendi | Peter Heeman | Jason Williams
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2011 Conference

2010

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Autism and Interactional Aspects of Dialogue
Peter Heeman | Rebecca Lunsford | Ethan Selfridge | Lois Black | Jan van Santen
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

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Importance-Driven Turn-Bidding for Spoken Dialogue Systems
Ethan Selfridge | Peter Heeman
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics