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.