This paper describes the use of Multi-Task Neural Networks (NNs) for system dialogue act selection. These models leverage the representations learned by the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) unit to enable robust initialization/bootstrapping of dialogue policies from medium sized initial data sets. We evaluate the models on two goal-oriented dialogue corpora in the travel booking domain. Results show the proposed models improve over models trained without knowledge of NLU tasks.

Large-scale grammar-based parsing systems nowadays increasingly rely on independently developed, more specialized components for pre-processing their input. However, different tools make conflicting assumptions about very basic properties such as tokenization. To make linguistic annotation gathered in pre-processing available to “deep” parsing, a hybrid NLP system needs to establish a coherent mapping between the two universes. Our basic assumption is that tokens are best described by attribute value matrices (AVMs) that may be arbitrarily complex. We propose a powerful resource-sensitive rewrite formalism, “chart mapping”, that allows us to mediate between the token descriptions delivered by shallow pre-processing components and the input expected by the grammar. We furthermore propose a novel way of unknown word treatment where all generic lexical entries are instantiated that are licensed by a particular token AVM. Again, chart mapping is used to give the grammar writer full control as to which items (e.g. native vs. generic lexical items) enter syntactic parsing. We discuss several further uses of the original idea and report on early experiences with the new machinery.

We discuss preprocessing and tokenisation standards within DELPH-IN, a large scale open-source collaboration providing multiple independent multilingual shallow and deep processors. We discuss (i) a component-specific XML interface format which has been used for some time to interface preprocessor results to the PET parser, and (ii) our implementation of a more generic XML interface format influenced heavily by the (ISO working draft) Morphosyntactic Annotation Framework (MAF). Our generic format encapsulates the information which may be passed from the preprocessing stage to a parser: it uses standoff-annotation, a lattice for the representation of structural ambiguity, intra-annotation dependencies and allows for highly structured annotation content. This work builds on the existing Heart of Gold middleware system, and previous work on Robust Minimal Recursion Semantics (RMRS) as part of an inter-component interface. We give examples of usage with a number of the DELPH-IN processing components and deep grammars.

We present a context-free approximation of unification-based grammars, such as HPSG or PATR-II. The theoretical underpinning is established through a least fixpoint construction over a certain monotonic function. In order to reach a finite fixpoint, the concrete implementation can be parameterized in several ways , either by specifying a finite iteration depth, by using different restrictors, or by making the symbols of the CFG more complex adding annotations a la GPSG. We also present several methods that speed up the approximation process and help to limit the size of the resulting CF grammar.