Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands

To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound commands with significantly less manual effort. We advocate formalizing the capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language (VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data; Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the synthesized data, to train a semantic parser. We also propose design principles that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We demonstrate Genie's generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control.Comment: To appear in PLDI 201

A novel and easy technique for restoring grossly decayed mandibular molar with a modified cast-post

The article addresses the difficulty of restoring a grossly carious molar tooth, where very little tooth structure is left after caries excavation. When enough sound tooth structure is missing for satisfying the ferrule effect, a clinician can follow this technique and easily restore such teeth. A step by step procedure, including instrumentation and materials and a new impression technique, is described in detail, with clinical photographs. This technique results in the fabrication of a robust and extremely retentive post and core on which to place fixed prosthodontic restorations. A 2 and half year study showed that the tooth well in function with no signs of any problem. The author has restored around many decayed molars using this technique. Over a period of three years, no failure was reported. With an increasing demand on the dentist for restoring a structurally compromised teeth, this technique provides the patients with a robust prosthodontic solution