Learning a Neural Semantic Parser from User Feedback

Srinivasan Iyer, Ioannis Konstas, Alvin Cheung, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Luke Zettlemoyer


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
P17-1089
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
963–973
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/P17-1089/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1089
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Srinivasan Iyer, Ioannis Konstas, Alvin Cheung, Jayant Krishnamurthy, and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2017. Learning a Neural Semantic Parser from User Feedback. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 963–973, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning a Neural Semantic Parser from User Feedback (Iyer et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/P17-1089.pdf
Note:
 P17-1089.Notes.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/P17-1089.mp4
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