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Can crowdsourced annotation of training data boost performance for relation extraction over methods based solely on distant supervision? While crowdsourcing has been shown effective for many NLP tasks, previous researchers found only minimal improvement when applying the method to relation extraction. This paper demonstrates that a much larger boost is possible, e.g., raising F1 from 0.40 to 0.60. Furthermore, the gains are due to a simple, generalizable technique, Gated Instruction, which combines an interactive tutorial, feedback to correct errors during training, and improved screening.

We explore the use of large pretrained language models as few-shot semantic parsers. The goal in semantic parsing is to generate a structured meaning representation given a natural language input. However, language models are trained to generate natural language.To bridge the gap, we use language models to paraphrase inputs into a controlled sublanguage resembling English that can be automatically mapped to a target meaning representation. Our results demonstrate that with only a small amount of data and very little code to convert into English-like representations, our blueprint for rapidly bootstrapping semantic parsers leads to surprisingly effective performance on multiple community tasks, greatly exceeding baseline methods also trained on the same limited data.

We describe an approach to task-oriented dialogue in which dialogue state is represented as a dataflow graph. A dialogue agent maps each user utterance to a program that extends this graph. Programs include metacomputation operators for reference and revision that reuse dataflow fragments from previous turns. Our graph-based state enables the expression and manipulation of complex user intents, and explicit metacomputation makes these intents easier for learned models to predict. We introduce a new dataset, SMCalFlow, featuring complex dialogues about events, weather, places, and people. Experiments show that dataflow graphs and metacomputation substantially improve representability and predictability in these natural dialogues. Additional experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset show that our dataflow representation enables an otherwise off-the-shelf sequence-to-sequence model to match the best existing task-specific state tracking model. The SMCalFlow dataset, code for replicating experiments, and a public leaderboard are available at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dataflow-based-dialogue-semantic-machines .

Tasks in mobile manipulation planning often require thousands of individual motions to complete. Such tasks require reasoning about complex goals as well as the feasibility of movements in configuration space. In discrete representations, planning complexity is exponential in the length of the plan. In mobile manipulation, parameters for an action often draw from a continuous space, so we must also cope with an infinite branching factor. Task and motion planning (TAMP) methods integrate logical search over high-level actions with geometric reasoning to address this challenge. We present an algorithm that searches the space of possible task and motion plans and uses statistical machine learning to guide the search process. Our contributions are as follows: 1) we present a complete algorithm for TAMP; 2) we present a randomized local search algorithm for plan refinement that is easily formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP); 3) we apply reinforcement learning (RL) to learn a policy for this MDP; 4) we learn from expert demonstrations to efficiently search the space of highlevel task plans, given options that address different (potential) infeasibilities; and 5) we run experiments to evaluate our system in a variety of simulated domains. We show significant improvements in performance over prior work.

No abstract

We explore the use of large pretrained language models as few-shot semantic parsers. The goal in semantic parsing is to generate a structured meaning representation given a natural language input. However, language models are trained to generate natural language. To bridge the gap, we use language models to paraphrase inputs into a controlled sublanguage resembling English that can be automatically mapped to a target meaning representation. With a small amount of data and very little code to convert into English-like representations, we provide a blueprint for rapidly bootstrapping semantic parsers and demonstrate good performance on multiple tasks.

Email triage involves going through unhandled emails and deciding what to do with them. This familiar process can become increasingly challenging as the number of unhandled email grows. During a triage session, users commonly defer handling emails that they cannot immediately deal with to later. These deferred emails, are often related to tasks that are postponed until the user has more time or the right information to deal with them. In this paper, through qualitative interviews and a large-scale log analysis, we study when and what enterprise email users tend to defer. We found that users are more likely to defer emails when handling them involves replying, reading carefully, or clicking on links and attachments. We also learned that the decision to defer emails depends on many factors such as user's workload and the importance of the sender.Our qualitative results suggested that deferring is very common, and our quantitative log analysis confirms that 12% of triage sessions and 16% of daily active users had at least one deferred email on weekdays. We also discuss several deferral strategies such as marking emails as unread and flagging that are reported by our interviewees, and illustrate how such patterns can be also observed in user logs.Inspired by the characteristics of deferred emails and contextual factors involved in deciding if an email should be deferred, we train a classifier for predicting whether a recently triaged email is actually deferred. Our experimental results suggests that deferral can be classified with modest effectiveness. Overall, our work provides novel insights about how users handle their emails and how deferral can be modeled.