Olivia Deng


2022

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Addressing Resource and Privacy Constraints in Semantic Parsing Through Data Augmentation
Kevin Yang | Olivia Deng | Charles Chen | Richard Shin | Subhro Roy | Benjamin Van Durme
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

We introduce a novel setup for low-resource task-oriented semantic parsing which incorporates several constraints that may arise in real-world scenarios: (1) lack of similar datasets/models from a related domain, (2) inability to sample useful logical forms directly from a grammar, and (3) privacy requirements for unlabeled natural utterances. Our goal is to improve a low-resource semantic parser using utterances collected through user interactions. In this highly challenging but realistic setting, we investigate data augmentation approaches involving generating a set of structured canonical utterances corresponding to logical forms, before simulating corresponding natural language and filtering the resulting pairs. We find that such approaches are effective despite our restrictive setup: in a low-resource setting on the complex SMCalFlow calendaring dataset (Andreas et al. 2020), we observe 33% relative improvement over a non-data-augmented baseline in top-1 match.

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Craft an Iron Sword: Dynamically Generating Interactive Game Characters by Prompting Large Language Models Tuned on Code
Ryan Volum | Sudha Rao | Michael Xu | Gabriel DesGarennes | Chris Brockett | Benjamin Van Durme | Olivia Deng | Akanksha Malhotra | Bill Dolan
Proceedings of the 3rd Wordplay: When Language Meets Games Workshop (Wordplay 2022)

Non-Player Characters (NPCs) significantly enhance the player experience in many games. Historically, players’ interactions with NPCs have tended to be highly scripted, to be limited to natural language responses to be selected by the player, and to not involve dynamic change in game state. In this work, we demonstrate that use of a few example conversational prompts can power a conversational agent to generate both natural language and novel code. This approach can permit development of NPCs with which players can have grounded conversations that are free-form and less repetitive. We demonstrate our approach using OpenAI Codex (GPT-3 finetuned on GitHub), with Minecraft game development as our test bed. We show that with a few example prompts, a Codex-based agent can generate novel code, hold multi-turn conversations and answer questions about structured data. We evaluate this application using experienced gamers in a Minecraft realm and provide analysis of failure cases and suggest possible directions for solutions.