This paper discusses the challenges non-prescriptive language uses in chatbot communication create for Semantic Parsing (SP). To help SP developers improve their systems, we propose a flexible error typology based on an analysis of a sample of non-prescriptive language uses mined from a domain-specific chatbot logs. This typology is not tied to any specific language model. We also present a framework for automatically mapping these errors to the typology. Finally, we show how our framework can help evaluate SP systems from a linguistic robustness perspective. Our framework can be expanded to include new classes of errors across different domains and user demographics.

This paper reports on an approach to increase multi-token-term recall in a parsing task. We use a compliance-domain parser to extract, during the process of parsing raw text, terms that are unlisted in the terminology. The parser uses a similarity measure (Generalized Dice Coefficient) between listed terms and unlisted term candidates to (i) determine term status, (ii) serve putative terms to the parser, (iii) decrease parsing complexity by glomming multi-tokens as lexical singletons, and (iv) automatically augment the terminology after parsing of an utterance completes. We illustrate a small experiment with examples from the tax-and-regulations domain. Bootstrapping the parsing process to detect out- of-vocabulary terms at runtime increases parsing accuracy in addition to producing other benefits to a natural-language-processing pipeline, which translates arithmetic calculations written in English into computer-executable operations.