Learning to Transform Natural to Formal Languages

This paper presents a method for inducing transformation rules that map natural-language sentences into a formal query or command language. The approach assumes a formal grammar for the target representation language and learns transformation rules that exploit the non-terminal symbols in this grammar. The learned transformation rules incrementally map a natural-language sentence or its syntactic parse tree into a parse-tree for the target formal language. Experimental results are presented for two corpora. one which maps English instructions into an existing formal coaching language for simulated RoboCup soccer agents, and another which maps English U.S.-geography questions into a database query language. We show that our method performs overall better and faster than previous approaches in both domains.

[1]  Antonio Zampolli,et al.  Linguistic structures processing , 1977 .

[2]  Stephen Muggleton,et al.  Efficient Induction of Logic Programs , 1990, ALT.

[3]  Luc De Raedt,et al.  Multiple Predicate Learning , 1993, IJCAI.

[4]  Saso Dzeroski,et al.  Inductive Logic Programming: Techniques and Applications , 1993 .

[5]  Eric Brill,et al.  Transformation-Based Error-Driven Learning and Natural Language Processing: A Case Study in Part-of-Speech Tagging , 1995, CL.

[6]  Raymond J. Mooney,et al.  Learning to Parse Database Queries Using Inductive Logic Programming , 1996, AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 2.

[7]  Victor Zue,et al.  Conversational interfaces: advances and challenges , 1997, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[8]  Daniel Gildea,et al.  Automatic Labeling of Semantic Roles , 2000, ACL.

[9]  Nello Cristianini,et al.  Classification using String Kernels , 2000 .

[10]  Raymond J. Mooney,et al.  Using Multiple Clause Constructors in Inductive Logic Programming for Semantic Parsing , 2001, ECML.

[11]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  Automatic Labeling of Semantic Roles , 2002, CL.

[12]  Henry A. Kautz,et al.  Towards a theory of natural language interfaces to databases , 2003, IUI '03.

[13]  Daniel M. Bikel,et al.  Intricacies of Collins’ Parsing Model , 2004, CL.

[14]  Oren Etzioni,et al.  Modern Natural Language Interfaces to Databases: Composing Statistical Parsing with Semantic Tractability , 2004, COLING.

[15]  Gregory Kuhlmann and Peter Stone and Raymond J. Mooney and Shavlik.  Guiding a Reinforcement Learner with Natural Language Advice: Initial Results in RoboCup Soccer , 2004, AAAI 2004.

[16]  Raymond J. Mooney,et al.  A Statistical Semantic Parser that Integrates Syntax and Semantics , 2005, CoNLL.