Semantic parsing requires training data that is expensive and slow to collect. We apply active learning to both traditional and “overnight” data collection approaches. We show that it is possible to obtain good training hyperparameters from seed data which is only a small fraction of the full dataset. We show that uncertainty sampling based on least confidence score is competitive in traditional data collection but not applicable for overnight collection. We propose several active learning strategies for overnight data collection and show that different example selection strategies per domain perform best.

Extending semantic parsing systems to new domains and languages is a highly expensive, time-consuming process, so making effective use of existing resources is critical. In this paper, we describe a transfer learning method using crosslingual word embeddings in a sequence-to-sequence model. On the NLmaps corpus, our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 85.7% for English. Most importantly, we observed a consistent improvement for German compared with several baseline domain adaptation techniques. As a by-product of this approach, our models that are trained on a combination of English and German utterances perform reasonably well on code-switching utterances which contain a mixture of English and German, even though the training data does not contain any such. As far as we know, this is the first study of code-switching in semantic parsing. We manually constructed the set of code-switching test utterances for the NLmaps corpus and achieve 78.3% accuracy on this dataset.

The Human Communication Science Virtual Laboratory (HCS vLab) is an eResearch project funded under the Australian Government NeCTAR program to build a platform for collaborative eResearch around data representing human communication and the tools that researchers use in their analysis. The human communication science field is broadly defined to encompass the study of language from various perspectives but also includes research on music and various other forms of human expression. This paper outlines the core architecture of the HCS vLab and in particular, highlights the web based API that provides access to data and tools to authenticated users.

This paper describes the AusTalk corpus, which was designed and created through the Big ASC, a collaborative project with the two main goals of providing a standardised infrastructure for audio-visual recordings in Australia and of producing a large audio-visual corpus of Australian English, with 3 hours of AV recordings for 1000 speakers. We first present the overall project, then describe the corpus itself and its components, the strict data collection protocol with high levels of standardisation and automation, and the processes put in place for quality control. We also discuss the annotation phase of the project, along with its goals and challenges; a major contribution of the project has been to explore procedures for automating annotations and we present our solutions. We conclude with the current status of the corpus and with some examples of research already conducted with this new resource. AusTalk is one of the corpora included in the HCS vLab, which is briefly sketched in the conclusion.