Conversational Semantic Parsing

Armen Aghajanyan, Jean Maillard, Akshat Shrivastava, Keith Diedrick, Michael Haeger, Haoran Li, Yashar Mehdad, Veselin Stoyanov, Anuj Kumar, Mike Lewis, Sonal Gupta


Abstract
The structured representation for semantic parsing in task-oriented assistant systems is geared towards simple understanding of one-turn queries. Due to the limitations of the representation, the session-based properties such as co-reference resolution and context carryover are processed downstream in a pipelined system. In this paper, we propose a semantic representation for such task-oriented conversational systems that can represent concepts such as co-reference and context carryover, enabling comprehensive understanding of queries in a session. We release a new session-based, compositional task-oriented parsing dataset of 20k sessions consisting of 60k utterances. Unlike Dialog State Tracking Challenges, the queries in the dataset have compositional forms. We propose a new family of Seq2Seq models for the session-based parsing above, which also set state-of-the-art in ATIS, SNIPS, TOP and DSTC2. Notably, we improve the best known results on DSTC2 by up to 5 points for slot-carryover.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.408
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5026–5035
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.408
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.408
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Armen Aghajanyan, Jean Maillard, Akshat Shrivastava, Keith Diedrick, Michael Haeger, Haoran Li, Yashar Mehdad, Veselin Stoyanov, Anuj Kumar, Mike Lewis, and Sonal Gupta. 2020. Conversational Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 5026–5035, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conversational Semantic Parsing (Aghajanyan et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.408.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938856
Data
ATIS