157 research outputs found
Learning a Neural Semantic Parser from User Feedback
We present an approach to rapidly and easily build natural language
interfaces to databases for new domains, whose performance improves over time
based on user feedback, and requires minimal intervention. To achieve this, we
adapt neural sequence models to map utterances directly to SQL with its full
expressivity, bypassing any intermediate meaning representations. These models
are immediately deployed online to solicit feedback from real users to flag
incorrect queries. Finally, the popularity of SQL facilitates gathering
annotations for incorrect predictions using the crowd, which is directly used
to improve our models. This complete feedback loop, without intermediate
representations or database specific engineering, opens up new ways of building
high quality semantic parsers. Experiments suggest that this approach can be
deployed quickly for any new target domain, as we show by learning a semantic
parser for an online academic database from scratch.Comment: Accepted at ACL 201
Robustness issues in a data-driven spoken language understanding system
Robustness is a key requirement in spoken language understanding (SLU) systems. Human speech is often ungrammatical and ill-formed, and there will frequently be a mismatch between training and test data. This paper discusses robustness and adaptation issues in a statistically-based SLU system which is entirely data-driven. To test robustness, the system has been tested on data from the Air Travel Information Service (ATIS) domain which has been artificially corrupted with varying levels of additive noise. Although the speech recognition performance degraded steadily, the system did not fail catastrophically. Indeed, the rate at which the end-to-end performance of the complete system degraded was significantly slower than that of the actual recognition component. In a second set of experiments, the ability to rapidly adapt the core understanding component of the system to a different application within the same broad domain has been tested. Using only a small amount of training data, experiments have shown that a semantic parser based on the Hidden Vector State (HVS) model originally trained on the ATIS corpus can be straightforwardly adapted to the somewhat different DARPA Communicator task using standard adaptation algorithms. The paper concludes by suggesting that the results presented provide initial support to the claim that an SLU system which is statistically-based and trained entirely from data is intrinsically robust and can be readily adapted to new applications
Building a robust dialogue system with limited data
We describe robustness techniques used in the CommandTalk system at the recognition level, the parsing level, and th dia6ue level, and how these were influenced by the lack of domain data. We used interviews with subject matter experts (SME's) to develop a single grammar for recognition, understanding, and generation, thus eliminating the need for a robust parser. We broadened the coverage of the recognition grammar by allowing word insertions and deletions, and we implemented clarification and correction subdialogues to increase robustness at tte dialogue level. We discuss the applicability of these techniques to other domains
GEMINI: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding
Gemini is a natural language understanding system developed for spoken
language applications. The paper describes the architecture of Gemini, paying
particular attention to resolving the tension between robustness and
overgeneration. Gemini features a broad-coverage unification-based grammar of
English, fully interleaved syntactic and semantic processing in an all-paths,
bottom-up parser, and an utterance-level parser to find interpretations of
sentences that might not be analyzable as complete sentences. Gemini also
includes novel components for recognizing and correcting grammatical
disfluencies, and for doing parse preferences. This paper presents a
component-by-component view of Gemini, providing detailed relevant measurements
of size, efficiency, and performance.Comment: 8 pages, postscrip
Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables
Two important aspects of semantic parsing for question answering are the
breadth of the knowledge source and the depth of logical compositionality.
While existing work trades off one aspect for another, this paper
simultaneously makes progress on both fronts through a new task: answering
complex questions on semi-structured tables using question-answer pairs as
supervision. The central challenge arises from two compounding factors: the
broader domain results in an open-ended set of relations, and the deeper
compositionality results in a combinatorial explosion in the space of logical
forms. We propose a logical-form driven parsing algorithm guided by strong
typing constraints and show that it obtains significant improvements over
natural baselines. For evaluation, we created a new dataset of 22,033 complex
questions on Wikipedia tables, which is made publicly available
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