Bo Chen

Bo Chen, Le Sun, Xianpei Han et al.

A major challenge of semantic parsing is the vocabulary mismatch problem between natural language and target ontology. In this paper, we propose a sentence rewriting based semantic parsing method, which can effectively resolve the mismatch problem by rewriting a sentence into a new form which has the same structure with its target logical form. Specifically, we propose two sentence-rewriting methods for two common types of mismatch: a dictionary-based method for 1-N mismatch and a template-based method for N-1 mismatch. We evaluate our entence rewriting based semantic parser on the benchmark semantic parsing dataset -- WEBQUESTIONS. Experimental results show that our system outperforms the base system with a 3.4% gain in F1, and generates logical forms more accurately and parses sentences more robustly.

Ganbin Zhou, Ping Luo, Rongyu Cao et al.

Different from other sequential data, sentences in natural language are structured by linguistic grammars. Previous generative conversational models with chain-structured decoder ignore this structure in human language and might generate plausible responses with less satisfactory relevance and fluency. In this study, we aim to incorporate the results from linguistic analysis into the process of sentence generation for high-quality conversation generation. Specifically, we use a dependency parser to transform each response sentence into a dependency tree and construct a training corpus of sentence-tree pairs. A tree-structured decoder is developed to learn the mapping from a sentence to its tree, where different types of hidden states are used to depict the local dependencies from an internal tree node to its children. For training acceleration, we propose a tree canonicalization method, which transforms trees into equivalent ternary trees. Then, with a proposed tree-structured search method, the model is able to generate the most probable responses in the form of dependency trees, which are finally flattened into sequences as the system output. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed X2Tree framework outperforms baseline methods over 11.15% increase of acceptance ratio.