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Interactive semantic parsing for if-then recipes via hierarchical reinforcement learning

Published: 27 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Given a text description, most existing semantic parsers synthesize a program in one shot. However, it is quite challenging to produce a correct program solely based on the description, which in reality is often ambiguous or incomplete. In this paper, we investigate interactive semantic parsing, where the agent can ask the user clarification questions to resolve ambiguities via a multi-turn dialogue, on an important type of programs called "If-Then recipes." We develop a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) based agent that significantly improves the parsing performance with minimal questions to the user. Results under both simulation and human evaluation show that our agent substantially outperforms non-interactive semantic parsers and rule-based agents.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)What If: Generating Code to Answer Simulation Questions in Chemistry TextsProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591783(1335-1344)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Accurate generation of trigger-action programs with domain-adapted sequence-to-sequence learningProceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3524610.3527922(99-110)Online publication date: 16-May-2022
  • (2022)In-IDE Code Generation from Natural Language: Promise and ChallengesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/348756931:2(1-47)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2022

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          cover image Guide Proceedings
          AAAI'19/IAAI'19/EAAI'19: Proceedings of the Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Thirty-First Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference and Ninth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence
          January 2019
          10088 pages
          ISBN:978-1-57735-809-1

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          Published: 27 January 2019

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          View all
          • (2023)What If: Generating Code to Answer Simulation Questions in Chemistry TextsProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591783(1335-1344)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
          • (2022)Accurate generation of trigger-action programs with domain-adapted sequence-to-sequence learningProceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3524610.3527922(99-110)Online publication date: 16-May-2022
          • (2022)In-IDE Code Generation from Natural Language: Promise and ChallengesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/348756931:2(1-47)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2022

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