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Register a new userEcological Semantics: Programming Environments for Situated Language Understanding
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Ronen Tamari
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Large-scale natural language understanding (NLU) systems have made impressive progress: they can be applied flexibly across a variety of tasks, and employ minimal structural assumptions. However, extensive empirical research has shown this to be a double-edged sword, coming at the cost of shallow understanding: inferior generalization, grounding and explainability. Grounded language learning approaches offer the promise of deeper understanding by situating learning in richer, more structured training environments, but are limited in scale to relatively narrow, predefined domains. How might we enjoy the best of both worlds: grounded, general NLU? Following extensive contemporary cognitive science, we propose treating environments as first-class citizens in semantic representations, worthy of research and development in their own right. Importantly, models should also be partners in the creation and configuration of environments, rather than just actors within them, as in existing approaches. To do so, we argue that models must begin to understand and program in the language of affordances (which define possible actions in a given situation) both for online, situated discourse comprehension, as well as large-scale, offline common-sense knowledge mining. To this end we propose an environment-oriented ecological semantics, outlining theoretical and practical approaches towards implementation. We further provide actual demonstrations building upon interactive fiction programming languages.
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AI systems have seen significant adoption in various domains. At the same time, further adoption in some domains is hindered by inability to fully trust an AI system that it will not harm a human. Besides the concerns for fairness, privacy, transparency, and explainability are key to developing trusts in AI systems. As stated in describing trustworthy AI Trust comes through understanding. How AI-led decisions are made and what determining factors were included are crucial to understand. The subarea of explaining AI systems has come to be known as XAI. Multiple aspects of an AI system can be explained; these include biases that the data might have, lack of data points in a particular region of the example space, fairness of gathering the data, feature importances, etc. However, besides these, it is critical to have human-centered explanations that are directly related to decision-making similar to how a domain expert makes decisions based on domain knowledge, that also include well-established, peer-validated explicit guidelines. To understand and validate an AI systems outcomes (such as classification, recommendations, predictions), that lead to developing trust in the AI system, it is necessary to involve explicit domain knowledge that humans understand and use.
This paper presents a deep learning architecture for the semantic decoder component of a Statistical Spoken Dialogue System. In a slot-filling dialogue, the semantic decoder predicts the dialogue act and a set of slot-value pairs from a set of n-best hypotheses returned by the Automatic Speech Recognition. Most current models for spoken language understanding assume (i) word-aligned semantic annotations as in sequence taggers and (ii) delexicalisation, or a mapping of input words to domain-specific concepts using heuristics that try to capture morphological variation but that do not scale to other domains nor to language variation (e.g., morphology, synonyms, paraphrasing ). In this work the semantic decoder is trained using unaligned semantic annotations and it uses distributed semantic representation learning to overcome the limitations of explicit delexicalisation. The proposed architecture uses a convolutional neural network for the sentence representation and a long-short term memory network for the context representation. Results are presented for the publicly available DSTC2 corpus and an In-car corpus which is similar to DSTC2 but has a significantly higher word error rate (WER).
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