Towards Programming in Natural Language: Learning New Functions from Spoken Utterances

Autor: Tobias Hey, Sebastian Weigelt, Walter F. Tichy, Vanessa Steurer
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
0209 industrial biotechnology
Linguistics and Language
Computer Networks and Communications
Computer science
Natural language understanding
02 engineering and technology
Programming in natural language
computer.software_genre
Semantics
Convolutional neural network
conversational interfaces
computational linguistics
Naive Bayes classifier
020901 industrial engineering & automation
0202 electrical engineering
electronic engineering
information engineering

natural language processing
intelligent systems
business.industry
DATA processing & computer science
Intelligent decision support system
end-user programming
neural networks
artificial intelligence
spoken language understanding
Computer Science Applications
machine learning
naturalistic programming
020201 artificial intelligence & image processing
natural language understanding
Artificial intelligence
ddc:004
Computational linguistics
business
computer
Software
Natural language
Natural language processing
Utterance
Information Systems
Zdroj: International journal of semantic computing, 14 (2), 249–272
ISSN: 1793-351X
1793-7108
DOI: 10.5445/ir/1000124405
Popis: Systems with conversational interfaces are rather popular nowadays. However, their full potential is not yet exploited. For the time being, users are restricted to calling predefined functions. Soon, users will expect to customize systems to their needs and create own functions using nothing but spoken instructions. Thus, future systems must understand how laypersons teach new functionality to intelligent systems. The understanding of natural language teaching sequences is a first step toward comprehensive end-user programming in natural language. We propose to analyze the semantics of spoken teaching sequences with a hierarchical classification approach. First, we classify whether an utterance constitutes an effort to teach a new function or not. Afterward, a second classifier locates the distinct semantic parts of teaching efforts: declaration of a new function, specification of intermediate steps, and superfluous information. For both tasks we implement a broad range of machine learning techniques: classical approaches, such as Naïve Bayes, and neural network configurations of various types and architectures, such as bidirectional LSTMs. Additionally, we introduce two heuristic-based adaptations that are tailored to the task of understanding teaching sequences. As data basis we use 3168 descriptions gathered in a user study. For the first task convolutional neural networks obtain the best results (accuracy: 96.6%); bidirectional LSTMs excel in the second (accuracy: 98.8%). The adaptations improve the first-level classification considerably (plus 2.2% points).
Databáze: OpenAIRE