An Imitation Game for Learning Semantic Parsers from User Interaction [article]

Ziyu Yao, Yiqi Tang, Wen-tau Yih, Huan Sun, Yu Su
2020 arXiv   pre-print
Despite the widely successful applications, bootstrapping and fine-tuning semantic parsers are still a tedious process with challenges such as costly data annotation and privacy risks. In this paper, we suggest an alternative, human-in-the-loop methodology for learning semantic parsers directly from users. A semantic parser should be introspective of its uncertainties and prompt for user demonstration when uncertain. In doing so it also gets to imitate the user behavior and continue improving
more » ... self autonomously with the hope that eventually it may become as good as the user in interpreting their questions. To combat the sparsity of demonstration, we propose a novel annotation-efficient imitation learning algorithm, which iteratively collects new datasets by mixing demonstrated states and confident predictions and re-trains the semantic parser in a Dataset Aggregation fashion (Ross et al., 2011). We provide a theoretical analysis of its cost bound and also empirically demonstrate its promising performance on the text-to-SQL problem. Code will be available at https://github.com/sunlab-osu/MISP.
arXiv:2005.00689v3 fatcat:x5wymysld5am7itpnyevorhx7e