Subhro Roy


2023

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InstructExcel: A Benchmark for Natural Language Instruction in Excel
Justin Payan | Swaroop Mishra | Mukul Singh | Carina Negreanu | Christian Poelitz | Chitta Baral | Subhro Roy | Rasika Chakravarthy | Benjamin Van Durme | Elnaz Nouri
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

With the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) we can solve increasingly more complex NLP tasks across various domains, including spreadsheets. This work investigates whether LLMs can generate code (Excel OfficeScripts, a TypeScript API for executing many tasks in Excel) that solves Excel specific tasks provided via natural language user instructions. To do so we introduce a new large-scale benchmark, InstructExcel, created by leveraging the ‘Automate’ feature in Excel to automatically generate OfficeScripts from users’ actions. Our benchmark includes over 10k samples covering 170+ Excel operations across 2,000 publicly available Excel spreadsheets. Experiments across various zero-shot and few-shot settings show that InstructExcel is a hard benchmark for state of the art models like GPT-4. We observe that (1) using GPT-4 over GPT-3.5, (2) providing more in-context examples, and (3) dynamic prompting can help improve performance on this benchmark.

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ZEROTOP: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing using Large Language Models
Dheeraj Mekala | Jason Wolfe | Subhro Roy
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We explore the use of large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot semantic parsing. Semantic parsing involves mapping natural language utterances to task-specific meaning representations. LLMs are generally trained on publicly available text and code and cannot be expected to directly generalize to domain-specific parsing tasks in a zero-shot setting. In this work, we propose ZEROTOP, a zero-shot task-oriented parsing method that decomposes semantic parsing problem into a set of abstractive and extractive question-answering (QA) problems. For each utterance, we prompt the LLM with questions corresponding to its top-level intent and a set of slots and use the LLM generations to construct the target meaning representation. We observe that current LLMs fail to detect unanswerable questions; and as a result, cannot handle questions corresponding to missing slots. We address this by fine-tuning a language model on public QA datasets using synthetic negative samples. Experimental results show that our QA-based decomposition paired with the fine-tuned LLM can zero-shot parse 16% of utterances in the MTOP dataset.

2022

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Addressing Resource and Privacy Constraints in Semantic Parsing Through Data Augmentation
Kevin Yang | Olivia Deng | Charles Chen | Richard Shin | Subhro Roy | Benjamin Van Durme
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

We introduce a novel setup for low-resource task-oriented semantic parsing which incorporates several constraints that may arise in real-world scenarios: (1) lack of similar datasets/models from a related domain, (2) inability to sample useful logical forms directly from a grammar, and (3) privacy requirements for unlabeled natural utterances. Our goal is to improve a low-resource semantic parser using utterances collected through user interactions. In this highly challenging but realistic setting, we investigate data augmentation approaches involving generating a set of structured canonical utterances corresponding to logical forms, before simulating corresponding natural language and filtering the resulting pairs. We find that such approaches are effective despite our restrictive setup: in a low-resource setting on the complex SMCalFlow calendaring dataset (Andreas et al. 2020), we observe 33% relative improvement over a non-data-augmented baseline in top-1 match.

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Guided K-best Selection for Semantic Parsing Annotation
Anton Belyy | Chieh-yang Huang | Jacob Andreas | Emmanouil Antonios Platanios | Sam Thomson | Richard Shin | Subhro Roy | Aleksandr Nisnevich | Charles Chen | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Collecting data for conversational semantic parsing is a time-consuming and demanding process. In this paper we consider, given an incomplete dataset with only a small amount of data, how to build an AI-powered human-in-the-loop process to enable efficient data collection. A guided K-best selection process is proposed, which (i) generates a set of possible valid candidates; (ii) allows users to quickly traverse the set and filter incorrect parses; and (iii) asks users to select the correct parse, with minimal modification when necessary. We investigate how to best support users in efficiently traversing the candidate set and locating the correct parse, in terms of speed and accuracy. In our user study, consisting of five annotators labeling 300 instances each, we find that combining keyword searching, where keywords can be used to query relevant candidates, and keyword suggestion, where representative keywords are automatically generated, enables fast and accurate annotation.

2021

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Constrained Language Models Yield Few-Shot Semantic Parsers
Richard Shin | Christopher Lin | Sam Thomson | Charles Chen | Subhro Roy | Emmanouil Antonios Platanios | Adam Pauls | Dan Klein | Jason Eisner | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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.

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Value-Agnostic Conversational Semantic Parsing
Emmanouil Antonios Platanios | Adam Pauls | Subhro Roy | Yuchen Zhang | Alexander Kyte | Alan Guo | Sam Thomson | Jayant Krishnamurthy | Jason Wolfe | Jacob Andreas | Dan Klein
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Conversational semantic parsers map user utterances to executable programs given dialogue histories composed of previous utterances, programs, and system responses. Existing parsers typically condition on rich representations of history that include the complete set of values and computations previously discussed. We propose a model that abstracts over values to focus prediction on type- and function-level context. This approach provides a compact encoding of dialogue histories and predicted programs, improving generalization and computational efficiency. Our model incorporates several other components, including an atomic span copy operation and structural enforcement of well-formedness constraints on predicted programs, that are particularly advantageous in the low-data regime. Trained on the SMCalFlow and TreeDST datasets, our model outperforms prior work by 7.3% and 10.6% respectively in terms of absolute accuracy. Trained on only a thousand examples from each dataset, it outperforms strong baselines by 12.4% and 6.4%. These results indicate that simple representations are key to effective generalization in conversational semantic parsing.

2020

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Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis
Jacob Andreas | John Bufe | David Burkett | Charles Chen | Josh Clausman | Jean Crawford | Kate Crim | Jordan DeLoach | Leah Dorner | Jason Eisner | Hao Fang | Alan Guo | David Hall | Kristin Hayes | Kellie Hill | Diana Ho | Wendy Iwaszuk | Smriti Jha | Dan Klein | Jayant Krishnamurthy | Theo Lanman | Percy Liang | Christopher H. Lin | Ilya Lintsbakh | Andy McGovern | Aleksandr Nisnevich | Adam Pauls | Dmitrij Petters | Brent Read | Dan Roth | Subhro Roy | Jesse Rusak | Beth Short | Div Slomin | Ben Snyder | Stephon Striplin | Yu Su | Zachary Tellman | Sam Thomson | Andrei Vorobev | Izabela Witoszko | Jason Wolfe | Abby Wray | Yuchen Zhang | Alexander Zotov
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

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.

2019

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Leveraging Past References for Robust Language Grounding
Subhro Roy | Michael Noseworthy | Rohan Paul | Daehyung Park | Nicholas Roy
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

Grounding referring expressions to objects in an environment has traditionally been considered a one-off, ahistorical task. However, in realistic applications of grounding, multiple users will repeatedly refer to the same set of objects. As a result, past referring expressions for objects can provide strong signals for grounding subsequent referring expressions. We therefore reframe the grounding problem from the perspective of coreference detection and propose a neural network that detects when two expressions are referring to the same object. The network combines information from vision and past referring expressions to resolve which object is being referred to. Our experiments show that detecting referring expression coreference is an effective way to ground objects described by subtle visual properties, which standard visual grounding models have difficulty capturing. We also show the ability to detect object coreference allows the grounding model to perform well even when it encounters object categories not seen in the training data.

2018

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Mapping to Declarative Knowledge for Word Problem Solving
Subhro Roy | Dan Roth
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 6

Math word problems form a natural abstraction to a range of quantitative reasoning problems, such as understanding financial news, sports results, and casualties of war. Solving such problems requires the understanding of several mathematical concepts such as dimensional analysis, subset relationships, etc. In this paper, we develop declarative rules which govern the translation of natural language description of these concepts to math expressions. We then present a framework for incorporating such declarative knowledge into word problem solving. Our method learns to map arithmetic word problem text to math expressions, by learning to select the relevant declarative knowledge for each operation of the solution expression. This provides a way to handle multiple concepts in the same problem while, at the same time, supporting interpretability of the answer expression. Our method models the mapping to declarative knowledge as a latent variable, thus removing the need for expensive annotations. Experimental evaluation suggests that our domain knowledge based solver outperforms all other systems, and that it generalizes better in the realistic case where the training data it is exposed to is biased in a different way than the test data.

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CogCompNLP: Your Swiss Army Knife for NLP
Daniel Khashabi | Mark Sammons | Ben Zhou | Tom Redman | Christos Christodoulopoulos | Vivek Srikumar | Nicholas Rizzolo | Lev Ratinov | Guanheng Luo | Quang Do | Chen-Tse Tsai | Subhro Roy | Stephen Mayhew | Zhili Feng | John Wieting | Xiaodong Yu | Yangqiu Song | Shashank Gupta | Shyam Upadhyay | Naveen Arivazhagan | Qiang Ning | Shaoshi Ling | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2016

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MAWPS: A Math Word Problem Repository
Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Subhro Roy | Aida Amini | Nate Kushman | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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Illinois Math Solver: Math Reasoning on the Web
Subhro Roy | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations

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Equation Parsing : Mapping Sentences to Grounded Equations
Subhro Roy | Shyam Upadhyay | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2015

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The University of Illinois submission to the WMT 2015 Shared Translation Task
Lane Schwartz | Bill Bryce | Chase Geigle | Sean Massung | Yisi Liu | Haoruo Peng | Vignesh Raja | Subhro Roy | Shyam Upadhyay
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

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Reasoning about Quantities in Natural Language
Subhro Roy | Tim Vieira | Dan Roth
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 3

Little work from the Natural Language Processing community has targeted the role of quantities in Natural Language Understanding. This paper takes some key steps towards facilitating reasoning about quantities expressed in natural language. We investigate two different tasks of numerical reasoning. First, we consider Quantity Entailment, a new task formulated to understand the role of quantities in general textual inference tasks. Second, we consider the problem of automatically understanding and solving elementary school math word problems. In order to address these quantitative reasoning problems we first develop a computational approach which we show to successfully recognize and normalize textual expressions of quantities. We then use these capabilities to further develop algorithms to assist reasoning in the context of the aforementioned tasks.

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Solving General Arithmetic Word Problems
Subhro Roy | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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