From word hypotheses to logical form: an efficient interleaved approach

Abstract

This paper revisits word lattice search whose task is to find a plausible semantic interpretation for a given utterance. Our approach of interleaved search and analysis is designed to break the frontier of "toy" applications. The framework is implemented in two interacting modules, running in parallel. Instead of simply parsing a word lattice, we rather do tree decoding with a probabilistic approximation of a given grammar, employing a beam search strategy. Logical form is build up in tandem according to the decoded derivation histories, using a codescriptive HPSG grammar for dialog turns. The proposed architecture only uses the knowledge necessary in every processing step, the key aspect being an asynchronous coupling of the two specialized modules.