Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing / Natural Language Interface

The Cold Start Problem

Semantic parsing, which maps natural language utterances into computer-understandable logical forms, has drawn substantial attention recently as a promising direction for developing natural language interfaces to computers. There are so many domains (healthcare, finance, IoT, sports, etc.) for which we can build a natural language interface, making portability / scalability an impending challenge. Or in other words, it's the cold start problem of natural language interface:

Given a new domain, how can we build a natural language interface for it?

Solution

There are three complementary ways to solve the cold start problem:

1. Re-use the training data for some existing domains via transfer learning (this repo)
2. Collect training data for the new domain via crowdsourcing [1] [2]
3. Once we cold-started a natural language interface with reasonable performance, develop some user-friendly interaction mechanism, deploy the system and let it interact with real users so it can keep refining itself [3] [4]

Use of This Repo

Requirements

• Python 2.7
• Tensorflow 0.11 (yes the TF version is a bit old..but it's still working reasonably well!)
• Yaml (for logging)

Setup

Install Tensorflow 0.11:

(GPU support)

export TF_BINARY_URL=https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/linux/gpu/tensorflow-0.11.0-cp27-none-linux_x86_64.whl
pip install --ignore-installed --upgrade $TF_BINARY_URL

(CPU only)

export TF_BINARY_URL=https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/linux/cpu/tensorflow-0.11.0-cp27-none-linux_x86_64.whl
pip install --ignore-installed --upgrade $TF_BINARY_URL

Install other dependencies:

pip install pyyaml

Training

We use the Overnight dataset, which contains 8 domains including Basketball, Calendar, and Restaurants. The dataset is already pre-processed and can be found under data.

Assume we are at the the root of the repo. All of training and testing can be done with the following command:

sh scripts/batch_run.sh 0 train_grid_unit_var overnight 0

The arguments are:

• GPU ID: which GPU to use for this run?
• Training Script: each word embedding initialization has a separate script
• Dataset: for now, the only option is overnight
• Execution Number: a unique number for this execution. A corresponding dir will be created under execs/ to host the trained model and the log of this execution.

The command will do the following tasks for each of the 8 domains:

1. In-domain: Train and test
2. In-domain: Re-train with the full training data (i.e., training+validation) and then test (final results for in-domain setting)
3. Cross-domain: Pre-training on the source domains
4. Cross-domain: Warm-start on target domain with pre-trained model, fine-tune with in-domain data, and test
5. Cross-domain: Re-train with full in-domain training data and then test (final results for cross-domain setting)

It's easy to train for another word embedding initialization strategy, e.g., original word2vec embedding without standardization. Just change the training script and execution number:

sh scripts/batch_run.sh 0 train_grid_original overnight 1

Extract Testing Results

We provide a script to make it easy to extract the testing results across all of the domains. For example,

In-domain, exec_num=0, re-training with full training data:

python scripts/extract_test_result.py in-domain overnight 0 1

In-domain, exec_num=0, no re-training:

python scripts/extract_test_result.py in-domain overnight 0 0

Cross-domain, exec_num=5, re-training with full training data:

python scripts/extract_test_result.py cross-domain overnight 5 1

References

Please refer to the following paper for more details. If you find it useful, please kindly consider to cite:

@InProceedings {su2017cross,
    author    = {Su, Yu and Yan, Xifeng},
    title     = {Cross-domain Semantic Parsing via Paraphrasing},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
    pages     = {1235--1246},
    year      = {2017},
    address   = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
    month     = {Sept},
    publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}
}

Other references for cold-starting a natural language interface

[1] Yu Su, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Madian Khabsa, Patrick Pantel, Michael Gamon, Mark Encarnacion. Building Natural Language Interfaces to Web APIs. CIKM 2017.

[2] Yu Su, Huan Sun, Brian Sadler, Mudhakar Srivatsa, Izzeddin Gur, Zenghui Yan, Xifeng Yan. On Generating Characteristic-rich Question Sets for QA Evaluation. EMNLP 2016.

[3] Izzeddin Gur, Semih Yavuz, Yu Su, Xifeng Yan. DialSQL: Dialogue Based Structured Query Generation. ACL 2018.

[4] Yu Su, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Miaosen Wang, Ryen White. Natural Language Interfaces with Fine-Grained User Interaction: A Case Study on Web APIs. SIGIR 2018