In plain words: When turning sentences into formal meaning representations, the model only scores next words a grammar allows, instead of checking every word in its vocabulary. On an in-house dataset with a large vocabulary, this made the same neural parser 74% faster than leaving predictions unrestricted.
Abstract
While sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models achieve state-of-the-art performance in many natural language processing tasks, they can be too slow for real-time applications. One performance bottleneck is predicting the most likely next token over a large vocabulary; methods to circumvent this bottleneck are a current research topic. We focus specifically on using seq2seq models for semantic parsing, where we observe that grammars often exist which specify valid formal representations of utterance semantics. By developing a generic approach for restricting the predictions of a seq2seq model to grammatically permissible continuations, we arrive at a widely applicable technique for speeding up semantic parsing. The technique leads to a 74% speed-up on an in-house dataset with a large vocabulary, compared to the same neural model without grammatical restrictions.
Chunyang Xiao, Christoph Teichmann, Konstantine Arkoudas
arXiv:1907.11049 · cs.CL · submitted Jul 25, 2019
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