We present our findings from a usability study of an interactive semantic parsing system for knowledge based question answering (KBQA). The system is designed to help users access information within a knowledge base without having to know its query language. The system translates the user’s question into the query language, retrieves an answer, then presents an English explanation of the process so that the user can make corrections if necessary. To our knowledge, our work is the most thorough usability study conducted for such a system and the only one that uses crowdworkers as participants to verify that the system is usable for average users. Our crowdworkers participate in KBQA dialogues using 4 versions of a system based on the framework by Mo et al. (2022) and answer surveys about their experiences. Some key takeaways from this work are: 1) we provide evidence for the benefits of interactivity in semantic parsing with human users and using generated questions in lieu of templated representations, 2) we identify limitations of simulations and provide contrasting evidence from actual system use, and 3) we provide an examination of crowdsourcing methodology, in particular the trade-offs of using crowdworkers vs. a specially trained group of evaluators.

LLMs are known to be very powerful, exhibiting both great benefits and great risk. We seek to leverage the benefits, in particular the ability to be fluent, conversational dialogue agents, while minimizing the risks, such as hallucination and toxic content. In this work we use knowledge distillation to create a virtual museum tour guide dialogue agent, employing ChatGPT as a teacher model for a smaller student model, T5-large. We find the T5 model shows competitive performance, significantly reduces instances of hallucination, and shows promise for reducing toxic content.

We introduce TacoBot, a user-centered task-oriented digital assistant designed to guide users through complex real-world tasks with multiple steps. Covering a wide range of cooking and how-to tasks, we aim to deliver a collaborative and engaging dialogue experience. Equipped with language understanding, dialogue management, and response generation components supported by a robust search engine, TacoBot ensures efficient task assistance. To enhance the dialogue experience, we explore a series of data augmentation strategies using LLMs to train advanced neural models continuously. TacoBot builds upon our successful participation in the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, where our team secured third place among ten competing teams. We offer TacoBot as an open-source framework that serves as a practical example for deploying task-oriented dialogue systems.

Existing studies on semantic parsing focus on mapping a natural-language utterance to a logical form (LF) in one turn. However, because natural language may contain ambiguity and variability, this is a difficult challenge. In this work, we investigate an interactive semantic parsing framework that explains the predicted LF step by step in natural language and enables the user to make corrections through natural-language feedback for individual steps. We focus on question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) as an instantiation of our framework, aiming to increase the transparency of the parsing process and help the user trust the final answer. We construct INSPIRED, a crowdsourced dialogue dataset derived from the ComplexWebQuestions dataset. Our experiments show that this framework has the potential to greatly improve overall parse accuracy. Furthermore, we develop a pipeline for dialogue simulation to evaluate our framework w.r.t. a variety of state-of-the-art KBQA models without further crowdsourcing effort. The results demonstrate that our framework promises to be effective across such models.