scholarly journals A New Corpus and Imitation Learning Framework for Context-Dependent Semantic Parsing

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 547-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Vlachos ◽  
Stephen Clark
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Imitation Learning ◽  
Semantic Parsing ◽  
Learning Framework ◽  
Test Sets ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Meaning Representation ◽  
Tourist Information

Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into a machine-interpretable meaning representation. Most approaches to this task have been evaluated on a small number of existing corpora which assume that all utterances must be interpreted according to a database and typically ignore context. In this paper we present a new, publicly available corpus for context-dependent semantic parsing. The MRL used for the annotation was designed to support a portable, interactive tourist information system. We develop a semantic parser for this corpus by adapting the imitation learning algorithm DAgger without requiring alignment information during training. DAgger improves upon independently trained classifiers by 9.0 and 4.8 points in F-score on the development and test sets respectively.

scholarly journals Semantic Parsing of Ambiguous Input through Paraphrasing and Verification

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 571-584
Author(s):  
Philip Arthur ◽  
Graham Neubig ◽  
Sakriani Sakti ◽  
Tomoki Toda ◽  
Satoshi Nakamura
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Model ◽  
Input String ◽  
New Method ◽  
Semantic Parsing ◽  
Search Queries ◽  
Input Sentence ◽  
Meaning Representation ◽  
Context Free ◽  
Do So

We propose a new method for semantic parsing of ambiguous and ungrammatical input, such as search queries. We do so by building on an existing semantic parsing framework that uses synchronous context free grammars (SCFG) to jointly model the input sentence and output meaning representation. We generalize this SCFG framework to allow not one, but multiple outputs. Using this formalism, we construct a grammar that takes an ambiguous input string and jointly maps it into both a meaning representation and a natural language paraphrase that is less ambiguous than the original input. This paraphrase can be used to disambiguate the meaning representation via verification using a language model that calculates the probability of each paraphrase.

scholarly journals Learning to Map Frequent Phrases to Sub-Structures of Meaning Representation for Neural Semantic Parsing

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 7546-7553
Author(s):  
Bo Chen ◽  
Xianpei Han ◽  
Ben He ◽  
Le Sun
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Performance Improvement ◽  
Search Space ◽  
Great Benefit ◽  
Semantic Parsing ◽  
Mismatch Problem ◽  
Weakly Supervised ◽  
Meaning Representation

Neural semantic parsers usually generate meaning representation tokens from natural language tokens via an encoder-decoder model. However, there is often a vocabulary-mismatch problem between natural language utterances and logical forms. That is, one word maps to several atomic logical tokens, which need to be handled as a whole, rather than individual logical tokens at multiple steps. In this paper, we propose that the vocabulary-mismatch problem can be effectively resolved by leveraging appropriate logical tokens. Specifically, we exploit macro actions, which are of the same granularity of words/phrases, and allow the model to learn mappings from frequent phrases to corresponding sub-structures of meaning representation. Furthermore, macro actions are compact, and therefore utilizing them can significantly reduce the search space, which brings a great benefit to weakly supervised semantic parsing. Experiments show that our method leads to substantial performance improvement on three benchmarks, in both supervised and weakly supervised settings.

scholarly journals Break It Down: A Question Understanding Benchmark

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
Tomer Wolfson ◽  
Mor Geva ◽  
Ankit Gupta ◽  
Matt Gardner ◽  
Yoav Goldberg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Formal Language ◽  
Question Answering ◽  
Semantic Parsing ◽  
Open Domain ◽  
Meaning Representation

Understanding natural language questions entails the ability to break down a question into the requisite steps for computing its answer. In this work, we introduce a Question Decomposition Meaning Representation (QDMR) for questions. QDMR constitutes the ordered list of steps, expressed through natural language, that are necessary for answering a question. We develop a crowdsourcing pipeline, showing that quality QDMRs can be annotated at scale, and release the Break dataset, containing over 83K pairs of questions and their QDMRs. We demonstrate the utility of QDMR by showing that (a) it can be used to improve open-domain question answering on the HotpotQA dataset, (b) it can be deterministically converted to a pseudo-SQL formal language, which can alleviate annotation in semantic parsing applications. Last, we use Break to train a sequence-to-sequence model with copying that parses questions into QDMR structures, and show that it substantially outperforms several natural baselines.

scholarly journals On systematically building a controlled natural language for functional requirements

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvaro Veizaga ◽  
Mauricio Alferez ◽  
Damiano Torre ◽  
Mehrdad Sabetzadeh ◽  
Lionel Briand
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Empirical Evaluation ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
Industrial Case Study ◽  
Requirements Specifications ◽  
Financial Domain

AbstractNatural language (NL) is pervasive in software requirements specifications (SRSs). However, despite its popularity and widespread use, NL is highly prone to quality issues such as vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness. Controlled natural languages (CNLs) have been proposed as a way to prevent quality problems in requirements documents, while maintaining the flexibility to write and communicate requirements in an intuitive and universally understood manner. In collaboration with an industrial partner from the financial domain, we systematically develop and evaluate a CNL, named Rimay, intended at helping analysts write functional requirements. We rely on Grounded Theory for building Rimay and follow well-known guidelines for conducting and reporting industrial case study research. Our main contributions are: (1) a qualitative methodology to systematically define a CNL for functional requirements; this methodology is intended to be general for use across information-system domains, (2) a CNL grammar to represent functional requirements; this grammar is derived from our experience in the financial domain, but should be applicable, possibly with adaptations, to other information-system domains, and (3) an empirical evaluation of our CNL (Rimay) through an industrial case study. Our contributions draw on 15 representative SRSs, collectively containing 3215 NL requirements statements from the financial domain. Our evaluation shows that Rimay is expressive enough to capture, on average, 88% (405 out of 460) of the NL requirements statements in four previously unseen SRSs from the financial domain.

scholarly journals Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds for Meta-Learning and Applications

Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
Sharu Theresa Jose ◽  
Osvaldo Simeone
Keyword(s):  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Broad Class ◽  
Performance Measure ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Learning To Learn ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Information Theoretic ◽  
Meta Learning ◽  
Task Training ◽  
Test Sets

Meta-learning, or “learning to learn”, refers to techniques that infer an inductive bias from data corresponding to multiple related tasks with the goal of improving the sample efficiency for new, previously unobserved, tasks. A key performance measure for meta-learning is the meta-generalization gap, that is, the difference between the average loss measured on the meta-training data and on a new, randomly selected task. This paper presents novel information-theoretic upper bounds on the meta-generalization gap. Two broad classes of meta-learning algorithms are considered that use either separate within-task training and test sets, like model agnostic meta-learning (MAML), or joint within-task training and test sets, like reptile. Extending the existing work for conventional learning, an upper bound on the meta-generalization gap is derived for the former class that depends on the mutual information (MI) between the output of the meta-learning algorithm and its input meta-training data. For the latter, the derived bound includes an additional MI between the output of the per-task learning procedure and corresponding data set to capture within-task uncertainty. Tighter bounds are then developed for the two classes via novel individual task MI (ITMI) bounds. Applications of the derived bounds are finally discussed, including a broad class of noisy iterative algorithms for meta-learning.

scholarly journals Large-scale Semantic Parsing without Question-Answer Pairs

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 377-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siva Reddy ◽  
Mirella Lapata ◽  
Mark Steedman
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Graph Matching ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Semantic Parsing ◽  
Matching Problem ◽  
Weak Supervision ◽  
Benchmark Datasets

In this paper we introduce a novel semantic parsing approach to query Freebase in natural language without requiring manual annotations or question-answer pairs. Our key insight is to represent natural language via semantic graphs whose topology shares many commonalities with Freebase. Given this representation, we conceptualize semantic parsing as a graph matching problem. Our model converts sentences to semantic graphs using CCG and subsequently grounds them to Freebase guided by denotations as a form of weak supervision. Evaluation experiments on a subset of the Free917 and WebQuestions benchmark datasets show our semantic parser improves over the state of the art.

scholarly journals Application of natural language processing methods to extract coded data from administrative data held in the Scottish Prescribing Information System

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Nangle ◽  
Stuart McTaggart ◽  
Margaret MacLeod ◽  
Jackie Caldwell ◽  
Marion Bennie
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Drug Exposure ◽  
Drug Dose ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Prescribing Information

ABSTRACT ObjectivesThe Prescribing Information System (PIS) datamart, hosted by NHS National Services Scotland receives around 90 million electronic prescription messages per year from GP practices across Scotland. Prescription messages contain information including drug name, quantity and strength stored as coded, machine readable, data while prescription dose instructions are unstructured free text and difficult to interpret and analyse in volume. The aim, using Natural Language Processing (NLP), was to extract drug dose amount, unit and frequency metadata from freely typed text in dose instructions to support calculating the intended number of days’ treatment. This then allows comparison with actual prescription frequency, treatment adherence and the impact upon prescribing safety and effectiveness. ApproachAn NLP algorithm was developed using the Ciao implementation of Prolog to extract dose amount, unit and frequency metadata from dose instructions held in the PIS datamart for drugs used in the treatment of gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. Accuracy estimates were obtained by randomly sampling 0.1% of the distinct dose instructions from source records, comparing these with metadata extracted by the algorithm and an iterative approach was used to modify the algorithm to increase accuracy and coverage. ResultsThe NLP algorithm was applied to 39,943,465 prescription instructions issued in 2014, consisting of 575,340 distinct dose instructions. For drugs used in the gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and respiratory systems (i.e. chapters 1, 2 and 3 of the British National Formulary (BNF)) the NLP algorithm successfully extracted drug dose amount, unit and frequency metadata from 95.1%, 98.5% and 97.4% of prescriptions respectively. However, instructions containing terms such as ‘as directed’ or ‘as required’ reduce the usability of the metadata by making it difficult to calculate the total dose intended for a specific time period as 7.9%, 0.9% and 27.9% of dose instructions contained terms meaning ‘as required’ while 3.2%, 3.7% and 4.0% contained terms meaning ‘as directed’, for drugs used in BNF chapters 1, 2 and 3 respectively. ConclusionThe NLP algorithm developed can extract dose, unit and frequency metadata from text found in prescriptions issued to treat a wide range of conditions and this information may be used to support calculating treatment durations, medicines adherence and cumulative drug exposure. The presence of terms such as ‘as required’ and ‘as directed’ has a negative impact on the usability of the metadata and further work is required to determine the level of impact this has on calculating treatment durations and cumulative drug exposure.

scholarly journals An Adaptive Imitation Learning Framework for Robotic Complex Contact-Rich Insertion Tasks

2022 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Wang ◽  
Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez ◽  
Weiwei Wan ◽  
Kensuke Harada
Keyword(s):  
Force Control ◽  
Robotic Manipulation ◽  
Imitation Learning ◽  
Specific Class ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Single Task ◽  
Learning Framework ◽  
Dynamic Movement ◽  
Real Hardware ◽  
Dynamic Movement Primitives

Complex contact-rich insertion is a ubiquitous robotic manipulation skill and usually involves nonlinear and low-clearance insertion trajectories as well as varying force requirements. A hybrid trajectory and force learning framework can be utilized to generate high-quality trajectories by imitation learning and find suitable force control policies efficiently by reinforcement learning. However, with the mentioned approach, many human demonstrations are necessary to learn several tasks even when those tasks require topologically similar trajectories. Therefore, to reduce human repetitive teaching efforts for new tasks, we present an adaptive imitation framework for robot manipulation. The main contribution of this work is the development of a framework that introduces dynamic movement primitives into a hybrid trajectory and force learning framework to learn a specific class of complex contact-rich insertion tasks based on the trajectory profile of a single task instance belonging to the task class. Through experimental evaluations, we validate that the proposed framework is sample efficient, safer, and generalizes better at learning complex contact-rich insertion tasks on both simulation environments and on real hardware.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document