Michael Haeger


2020

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Conversational Semantic Parsing
Armen Aghajanyan | Jean Maillard | Akshat Shrivastava | Keith Diedrick | Michael Haeger | Haoran Li | Yashar Mehdad | Veselin Stoyanov | Anuj Kumar | Mike Lewis | Sonal Gupta
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The structured representation for semantic parsing in task-oriented assistant systems is geared towards simple understanding of one-turn queries. Due to the limitations of the representation, the session-based properties such as co-reference resolution and context carryover are processed downstream in a pipelined system. In this paper, we propose a semantic representation for such task-oriented conversational systems that can represent concepts such as co-reference and context carryover, enabling comprehensive understanding of queries in a session. We release a new session-based, compositional task-oriented parsing dataset of 20k sessions consisting of 60k utterances. Unlike Dialog State Tracking Challenges, the queries in the dataset have compositional forms. We propose a new family of Seq2Seq models for the session-based parsing above, which also set state-of-the-art in ATIS, SNIPS, TOP and DSTC2. Notably, we improve the best known results on DSTC2 by up to 5 points for slot-carryover.