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Sam Thomson

10 accepted papers

2025

MICE for CATs: Model-Internal Confidence Estimation for Calibrating Agents with Tools

NAACL 2025long

Tool-using agents that act in the world need to be both useful and safe. Well-calibrated model confidences can be used to weigh the risk versus reward of potential actions, but prior work shows that many models are poorly calibrated. Inspired by interpretability literature exploring the internals of…

2024

Language-to-Code Translation with a Single Labeled Example

EMNLP 2024main

Tools for translating natural language into code promise natural, open-ended interaction with databases, web APIs, and other software systems. However, this promise is complicated by the diversity and continual development of these systems, each with its own interface and distinct set of features. B…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

BenchCLAMP: A Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models on Syntactic and Semantic Parsing

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent work has shown that generation from a prompted or fine-tuned language model can perform well at semantic parsing when the output is constrained to be a valid semantic representation. We introduce BenchCLAMP, a Benchmark to evaluate Constrained LAnguage Model Parsing, that includes context-fre…

2022

Online Semantic Parsing for Latency Reduction in Task-Oriented Dialogue

ACL 2022long

Standard conversational semantic parsing maps a complete user utterance into an executable program, after which the program is executed to respond to the user. This could be slow when the program contains expensive function calls. We investigate the opportunity to reduce latency by predicting and ex…

2022

When More Data Hurts: A Troubling Quirk in Developing Broad-Coverage Natural Language Understanding Systems

EMNLP 2022main

In natural language understanding (NLU) production systems, users’ evolving needs necessitate the addition of new features over time, indexed by new symbols added to the meaning representation space. This requires additional training data and results in ever-growing datasets. We present the first sy…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2021

Compositional Generalization for Neural Semantic Parsing via Span-level Supervised Attention

NAACL 2021long

We describe a span-level supervised attention loss that improves compositional generalization in semantic parsers. Our approach builds on existing losses that encourage attention maps in neural sequence-to-sequence models to imitate the output of classical word alignment algorithms. Where past work…

Cited by 63SourcePDFScholar
2021

Constrained Language Models Yield Few-Shot Semantic Parsers

EMNLP 2021main

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 m…

2021

Value-Agnostic Conversational Semantic Parsing

ACL 2021long

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 previo…

2018

Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing With Global Context

CVPR 2018poster

We investigate the problem of producing structured graph representations of visual scenes. Our work analyzes the role of motifs: regularly appearing substructures in scene graphs. We present new quantitative insights on such repeated structures in the Visual Genome dataset. Our analysis shows that o…