A New Corpus and Imitation Learning Framework for Context-Dependent Semantic Parsing

Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into a machine- interpretable meaning representation. Most approaches to this task have been evaluated on a small number of existing corpora which assume that all utterances must be interpreted according to a database and typically ignore context. In this paper we present a new, pub- licly available corpus for context-dependent semantic parsing. The MRL used for the an- notation was designed to support a portable, interactive tourist information system. We develop a semantic parser for this corpus by adapting the imitation learning algorithm DAGGER without requiring alignment infor- mation during training. DAGGER improves upon independently trained classifiers by 9.0 and 4.8 points in F-score on the development and test sets respectively.