X2Parser: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Framework for Task-Oriented Compositional Semantic Parsing

Zihan Liu, Genta Indra Winata, Peng Xu, Pascale Fung


Abstract
Task-oriented compositional semantic parsing (TCSP) handles complex nested user queries and serves as an essential component of virtual assistants. Current TCSP models rely on numerous training data to achieve decent performance but fail to generalize to low-resource target languages or domains. In this paper, we present X2Parser, a transferable Cross-lingual and Cross-domain Parser for TCSP. Unlike previous models that learn to generate the hierarchical representations for nested intents and slots, we propose to predict intents and slots separately and cast both prediction tasks into sequence labeling problems. After that, we further propose a fertility-based slot predictor that first learns to detect the number of labels for each token, and then predicts the slot types. Experimental results illustrate that our model can significantly outperform existing strong baselines in cross-lingual and cross-domain settings, and our model can also achieve a good generalization ability on target languages of target domains. Furthermore, we show that our model can reduce the latency by up to 66% compared to the generation-based model.
Anthology ID:
2021.repl4nlp-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Iacer Calixto, Ivan Vulić, Naomi Saphra, Nora Kassner, Oana-Maria Camburu, Trapit Bansal, Vered Shwartz
Venue:
RepL4NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
112–127
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.repl4nlp-1.13
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.repl4nlp-1.13
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zihan Liu, Genta Indra Winata, Peng Xu, and Pascale Fung. 2021. X2Parser: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Framework for Task-Oriented Compositional Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP-2021), pages 112–127, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
X2Parser: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Framework for Task-Oriented Compositional Semantic Parsing (Liu et al., RepL4NLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.repl4nlp-1.13.pdf
Code
 zliucr/X2Parser
Data
MTOP