Localizing Open-Ontology QA Semantic Parsers in a Day Using Machine Translation

We propose Semantic Parser Localizer (SPL), a toolkit that leverages Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems to localize a semantic parser for a new language. Our methodology is to (1) generate training data automatically in the target language by augmenting machine-translated datasets with local entities scraped from public websites, (2) add a fewshot boost of human-translated sentences and train a novel XLMR-LSTM semantic parser, and (3) test the model on natural utterances curated using human translators. We assess the effectiveness of our approach by extending the current capabilities of Schema2QA, a system for English Question Answering (QA) on the open web, to 10 new languages for the restaurants and hotels domains. Our models achieve an overall test accuracy ranging between 61% and 69% for the hotels domain and between 64% and 78% for restaurants domain, which compares favorably to 69% and 80% obtained for English parser trained on gold English data and a few examples from validation set. We show our approach outperforms the previous state-of-theart methodology by more than 30% for hotels and 40% for restaurants with localized ontologies for the subset of languages tested. Our methodology enables any software developer to add a new language capability to a QA system for a new domain, leveraging machine translation, in less than 24 hours. Our code is released open-source. 1 Language Country Examples Hotels English I want a hotel near times square that has at least 1000 reviews. Arabic German Ich möchte ein hotel in der nähe von marienplatz, das mindestens 1000 bewertungen hat. Spanish Busco un hotel cerca de puerto banús que tenga al menos 1000 comentarios. Farsi Finnish Haluan paikan helsingin tuomiokirkko läheltä hotellin, jolla on vähintään 1000 arvostelua. Italian Voglio un hotel nei pressi di colosseo che abbia almeno 1000 recensioni. Japanese 東京スカイツリー周辺でに1000件以上のレビューがあるホテルを見せて。 Polish Potrzebuję hotelu w pobliżu zamek w malborku, który ma co najmniej 1000 ocen. Turkish Kapalı carşı yakınlarında en az 1000 yoruma sahip bir otel istiyorum. Chinese 我想在天安门广场附近找一家有至少1000条评论的酒店。 Restaurants English find me a restaurant that serves burgers and is open at 14:30 . Arabic German Finden sie bitte ein restaurant mit maultaschen essen, das um 14:30 öffnet. Spanish Busque un restaurante que sirva comida paella valenciana y abra a las 14:30. Farsi Finnish Etsi minulle ravintola joka tarjoilee karjalanpiirakka ruokaa ja joka aukeaa kello 14:30 mennessä. Italian Trovami un ristorante che serve cibo lasagna e apre alle 14:30. Japanese 寿司フードを提供し、14:30までに開店するレストランを見つけてください。 Polish Znajdź restaurację, w której podaje się kotlet jedzenie i któr ą otwieraj ą o 14:30. Turkish Bana köfte yemekleri sunan ve 14:30 zamanına kadar açık olan bir restoran bul..