Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Framework and A Text-to-SQL Case Study

Ziyu Yao, Yu Su, Huan Sun, Wen-tau Yih


Abstract
As a promising paradigm, interactive semantic parsing has shown to improve both semantic parsing accuracy and user confidence in the results. In this paper, we propose a new, unified formulation of the interactive semantic parsing problem, where the goal is to design a model-based intelligent agent. The agent maintains its own state as the current predicted semantic parse, decides whether and where human intervention is needed, and generates a clarification question in natural language. A key part of the agent is a world model: it takes a percept (either an initial question or subsequent feedback from the user) and transitions to a new state. We then propose a simple yet remarkably effective instantiation of our framework, demonstrated on two text-to-SQL datasets (WikiSQL and Spider) with different state-of-the-art base semantic parsers. Compared to an existing interactive semantic parsing approach that treats the base parser as a black box, our approach solicits less user feedback but yields higher run-time accuracy.
Anthology ID:
D19-1547
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5447–5458
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1547
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1547
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ziyu Yao, Yu Su, Huan Sun, and Wen-tau Yih. 2019. Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Framework and A Text-to-SQL Case Study. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5447–5458, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Framework and A Text-to-SQL Case Study (Yao et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1547.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1547.Attachment.pdf
Code
 sunlab-osu/MISP +  additional community code
Data
WikiSQL