Learning Out-of-Vocabulary Words in Intelligent Personal Agents

Semantic parsers play a vital role in intelligent agents to convert natural language instructions to an actionable logical form representation. However, after deployment, these parsers suffer from poor accuracy on encountering out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, or significant accuracy drop on previously supported instructions after retraining. Achieving both goals simultaneously is non-trivial. In this paper, we propose novel neural networks based parsers to learn OOV words; one incorporating a new hybrid paraphrase generation model, and an enhanced sequence-to-sequence model. Extensive experiments on both benchmark and custom datasets show our new parsers achieve significant accuracy gain on OOV words and phrases, and in the meanwhile learn OOV words while maintaining accuracy on previously supported instructions.