Charles Newton


2021

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Semantic Parsing of Brief and Multi-Intent Natural Language Utterances
Logan Lebanoff | Charles Newton | Victor Hung | Beth Atkinson | John Killilea | Fei Liu
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Domain Adaptation for NLP

Many military communication domains involve rapidly conveying situation awareness with few words. Converting natural language utterances to logical forms in these domains is challenging, as these utterances are brief and contain multiple intents. In this paper, we present a first effort toward building a weakly-supervised semantic parser to transform brief, multi-intent natural utterances into logical forms. Our findings suggest a new “projection and reduction” method that iteratively performs projection from natural to canonical utterances followed by reduction of natural utterances is the most effective. We conduct extensive experiments on two military and a general-domain dataset and provide a new baseline for future research toward accurate parsing of multi-intent utterances.