Tom Kwiatkowski

Scalable Semantic Parsing with Partial Ontologies

We consider the problem of building scalable semantic parsers for Freebase, and present a new approach for learning to do partial analyses that ground as much of the input text as possible without requiring that all content words be mapped to Freebase concepts. We study this problem on two newly introduced large-scale noun phrase datasets, and present a new semantic parsing model and semi-supervised learning approach for reasoning with partial ontological support. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on two tasks: referring expression resolution and entity attribute extraction. In both cases, the partial analyses allow us to improve precision over strong baselines, while parsing many phrases that would be ignored by existing techniques.

“Can you give me another word for hyperbaric?”: Improving speech translation using targeted clarification questions

We present a novel approach for improving communication success between users of speech-to-speech translation systems by automatically detecting errors in the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. Our approach initiates system-driven targeted clarification about errorful regions in user input and repairs them given user responses. Our system has been evaluated by unbiased subjects in live mode, and results show improved success of communication between users of the system.

Morpho-syntactic Lexical Generalization for CCG Semantic Parsing

In this paper, we demonstrate that significant performance gains can be achieved in CCG semantic parsing by introducing a linguistically motivated grammar induction scheme. We present a new morpho-syntactic factored lexicon that models systematic variations in morphology, syntax, and semantics across word classes. The grammar uses domain-independent facts about the English language to restrict the number of incorrect parses that must be considered, thereby enabling eective learning from less data. Experiments in benchmark domains match previous models with one quarter of the data and provide new state-of-the-art results with all available data, including up to 45% relative test-error reduction.

Using syntactic and confusion network structure for out-of-vocabulary word detection

This paper addresses the problem of detecting words that are out-of-vocabulary (OOV) for a speech recognition system to improve automatic speech translation. The detection system leverages confidence prediction techniques given a confusion network representation and parsing with OOV word tokens to identify spans associated with true OOV words. Working in a resource-constrained domain, we achieve OOV detection F-scores of 60-66 and reduce word error rate by 12% relative to the case where OOV words are not detected.