Don’t paraphrase, detect! Rapid and Effective Data Collection for Semantic Parsing

Jonathan Herzig, Jonathan Berant


Abstract
A major hurdle on the road to conversational interfaces is the difficulty in collecting data that maps language utterances to logical forms. One prominent approach for data collection has been to automatically generate pseudo-language paired with logical forms, and paraphrase the pseudo-language to natural language through crowdsourcing (Wang et al., 2015). However, this data collection procedure often leads to low performance on real data, due to a mismatch between the true distribution of examples and the distribution induced by the data collection procedure. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze two sources of mismatch in this process: the mismatch in logical form distribution and the mismatch in language distribution between the true and induced distributions. We quantify the effects of these mismatches, and propose a new data collection approach that mitigates them. Assuming access to unlabeled utterances from the true distribution, we combine crowdsourcing with a paraphrase model to detect correct logical forms for the unlabeled utterances. On two datasets, our method leads to 70.6 accuracy on average on the true distribution, compared to 51.3 in paraphrasing-based data collection.
Anthology ID:
D19-1394
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3810–3820
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1394
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1394
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Herzig and Jonathan Berant. 2019. Don’t paraphrase, detect! Rapid and Effective Data Collection for Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 3810–3820, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Don’t paraphrase, detect! Rapid and Effective Data Collection for Semantic Parsing (Herzig & Berant, EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/D19-1394.pdf
Code
 jonathanherzig/semantic-parsing-annotation