Mon 24 Jun 2019 16:40 - 17:00 at 224AB - Parsing Chair(s): Qirun Zhang

To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound commands with significantly less manual effort.
We advocate formalizing the capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language (VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data; Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the synthesized data, to train a semantic parser.
We also propose design principles that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We
demonstrate Genie’s generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control.

Mon 24 Jun

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

16:00 - 17:00
ParsingPLDI Research Papers at 224AB
Chair(s): Qirun Zhang Georgia Institute of Technology
16:00
20m
Talk
Lightweight Multi-Language Syntax Transformation with Parser Parser Combinators
PLDI Research Papers
Rijnard van Tonder Carnegie Mellon University, Claire Le Goues Carnegie Mellon University
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
16:20
20m
Talk
A Typed, Algebraic Approach to Parsing
PLDI Research Papers
Neel Krishnaswami Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Jeremy Yallop University of Cambridge, UK
Link to publication DOI Pre-print
16:40
20m
Talk
Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands
PLDI Research Papers
Giovanni Campagna Stanford University, USA, Silei Xu , Mehrad Moradshahi Stanford University, USA, Richard Socher Salesforce, USA, Monica S. Lam Stanford University, USA
Media Attached