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Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in conversational systems, owing to its role of formulating a correct and natural text response. Traditionally, NLG components have been deployed using template-based solutions. Although neural network solutions recently developed in the research community have been shown to provide several benefits, deployment of such model-based solutions has been challenging due to high latency, correctness issues, and high data needs. In this paper, we present approaches that have helped us deploy data-efficient neural solutions for NLG in conversational systems to production. We describe a family of sampling and modeling techniques to attain production quality with light-weight neural network models using only a fraction of the data that would be necessary otherwise, and show a thorough comparison between each. Our results show that domain complexity dictates the appropriate approach to achieve high data efficiency. Finally, we distill the lessons from our experimental findings into a list of best practices for production-level NLG model development, and present them in a brief runbook. Importantly, the end products of all of the techniques are small sequence-to-sequence models (~2Mb) that we can reliably deploy in production. * Author list alphabetical by last name.

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Mental illnesses are a significant and growing public health concern. They have the potential to tremendously affect a person’s life. Depression, in particular, is one of the major reasons for suicide. In recent times, the popularity of social media websites has burgeoned as they are platforms that facilitate discussion and free-flowing conversation about a plethora of topics. Information and dialogue about subjects like mental health, which are still considered as a taboo in various cultures, are becoming more and more accessible. The objective of this paper is to review and comprehensively compare various previously employed Natural Language Processing techniques for the purpose of classification of social media text posts as those written by depressed individuals. Furthermore, pros, cons, and evaluation metrics of these techniques, along with the challenges faced and future directions in this area of research are also summarized.