Learning to Simulate Natural Language Feedback for Interactive Semantic Parsing

Hao Yan, Saurabh Srivastava, Yintao Tai, Sida I. Wang, Wen-tau Yih, Ziyu Yao


Abstract
Interactive semantic parsing based on natural language (NL) feedback, where users provide feedback to correct the parser mistakes, has emerged as a more practical scenario than the traditional one-shot semantic parsing. However, prior work has heavily relied on human-annotated feedback data to train the interactive semantic parser, which is prohibitively expensive and not scalable. In this work, we propose a new task of simulating NL feedback for interactive semantic parsing. We accompany the task with a novel feedback evaluator. The evaluator is specifically designed to assess the quality of the simulated feedback, based on which we decide the best feedback simulator from our proposed variants. On a text-to-SQL dataset, we show that our feedback simulator can generate high-quality NL feedback to boost the error correction ability of a specific parser. In low-data settings, our feedback simulator can help achieve comparable error correction performance as trained using the costly, full set of human annotations.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.177
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3149–3170
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.177
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.177
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hao Yan, Saurabh Srivastava, Yintao Tai, Sida I. Wang, Wen-tau Yih, and Ziyu Yao. 2023. Learning to Simulate Natural Language Feedback for Interactive Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3149–3170, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Simulate Natural Language Feedback for Interactive Semantic Parsing (Yan et al., ACL 2023)
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