@inproceedings{mekala-etal-2023-zerotop,
    title = "{ZEROTOP}: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing using Large Language Models",
    author = "Mekala, Dheeraj  and
      Wolfe, Jason  and
      Roy, Subhro",
    editor = "Bouamor, Houda  and
      Pino, Juan  and
      Bali, Kalika",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = dec,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Singapore",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2023.emnlp-main.354/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.354",
    pages = "5792--5799",
    abstract = "We explore the use of large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot semantic parsing. Semantic parsing involves mapping natural language utterances to task-specific meaning representations. LLMs are generally trained on publicly available text and code and cannot be expected to directly generalize to domain-specific parsing tasks in a zero-shot setting. In this work, we propose ZEROTOP, a zero-shot task-oriented parsing method that decomposes semantic parsing problem into a set of abstractive and extractive question-answering (QA) problems. For each utterance, we prompt the LLM with questions corresponding to its top-level intent and a set of slots and use the LLM generations to construct the target meaning representation. We observe that current LLMs fail to detect unanswerable questions; and as a result, cannot handle questions corresponding to missing slots. We address this by fine-tuning a language model on public QA datasets using synthetic negative samples. Experimental results show that our QA-based decomposition paired with the fine-tuned LLM can zero-shot parse $\approx$ 16{\%} of utterances in the MTOP dataset."
}