MARRS: Multimodal Reference Resolution System

*All authors listed have contributed equally to this work

Successfully handling context is essential for any dialog-understanding task. This context may be be conversational (relying on previous user queries or system responses), visual (relying on what the user sees, for example, on their screen), or background (based on signals such as a ringing alarm or playing music). In this work, we present an overview of MARRS, or Multimodal Reference Resolution System, an on-device framework within a Natural Language Understanding system, responsible for handling conversational, visual, and background context. In particular, we present different machine learning models to enable handling contextual queries; specifically, one to enable reference resolution and one to handle context via query rewriting. We also describe how these models complement each other to form a unified, coherent, lightweight system that can understand context while preserving user privacy.