As humans, we often rely on language to learn language. For example, when corrected in a conversation, we may learn from that correction, over time improving our language fluency. Inspired by this observation, we propose a learning algorithm for training semantic parsers from supervision (feedback) expressed in natural language. Our algorithm learns a semantic parser from users' corrections such as "no, what I really meant was before his job, not after", by also simultaneously learning to parse this natural language feedback in order to leverage it as a form of supervision. Unlike supervision with gold-standard logical forms, our method does not require the user to be familiar with the underlying logical formalism, and unlike supervision from denotation, it does not require the user to know the correct answer to their query. This makes our learning algorithm naturally scalable in settings where existing conversational logs are available and can be leveraged as training data. We construct a novel dataset of natural language feedback in a conversational setting, and show that our method is effective at learning a semantic parser from such natural language supervision.
@cite_38: In this work we present a technique to use natural language to help reinforcement learning generalize to unseen environments. This technique uses neural machine translation, specifically the use of encoder-decoder networks, to learn associations between natural language behavior descriptions and state-action information. We then use this learned model to guide agent exploration using a modified version of policy shaping to make it more effective at learning in unseen environments. We evaluate this technique using the popular arcade game, Frogger, under ideal and non-ideal conditions. This evaluation shows that our modified policy shaping algorithm improves over a Q-learning agent as well as a baseline version of policy shaping.
@cite_37: Machine learning offers a range of tools for training systems from data, but these methods are only as good as the underlying representation. This paper proposes to acquire representations for machine learning by reading text written to accommodate human learning. We propose a novel form of semantic analysis called reading to learn, where the goal is to obtain a high-level semantic abstract of multiple documents in a representation that facilitates learning. We obtain this abstract through a generative model that requires no labeled data, instead leveraging repetition across multiple documents. The semantic abstract is converted into a transformed feature space for learning, resulting in improved generalization on a relational learning task.
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@cite_33: We describe our current efforts towards creating a reinforcement learner that learns both from reinforcements provided by its environment and from human-generated advice. Our research involves two complementary components: (a) mapping advice expressed in English to a formal advice language and (b) using advice expressed in a formal notation in a reinforcement learner. We use a subtask of the challenging RoboCup simulated soccer task ( 1998) as our testbed.
@cite_32: In this paper, we consider the task of learning control policies for text-based games. In these games, all interactions in the virtual world are through text and the underlying state is not observed. The resulting language barrier makes such environments challenging for automatic game players. We employ a deep reinforcement learning framework to jointly learn state representations and action policies using game rewards as feedback. This framework enables us to map text descriptions into vector representations that capture the semantics of the game states. We evaluate our approach on two game worlds, comparing against baselines using bag-of-words and bag-of-bigrams for state representations. Our algorithm outperforms the baselines on both worlds demonstrating the importance of learning expressive representations.
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@cite_5: Solving algebraic word problems requires executing a series of arithmetic operations---a program---to obtain a final answer. However, since programs can be arbitrarily complicated, inducing them directly from question-answer pairs is a formidable challenge. To make this task more feasible, we solve these problems by generating answer rationales, sequences of natural language and human-readable mathematical expressions that derive the final answer through a series of small steps. Although rationales do not explicitly specify programs, they provide a scaffolding for their structure via intermediate milestones. To evaluate our approach, we have created a new 100,000-sample dataset of questions, answers and rationales. Experimental results show that indirect supervision of program learning via answer rationales is a promising strategy for inducing arithmetic programs.
@cite_10: Domain knowledge is crucial for effective performance in autonomous control systems. Typically, human effort is required to encode this knowledge into a control algorithm. In this paper, we present an approach to language grounding which automatically interprets text in the context of a complex control application, such as a game, and uses domain knowledge extracted from the text to improve control performance. Both text analysis and control strategies are learned jointly using only a feedback signal inherent to the application. To effectively leverage textual information, our method automatically extracts the text segment most relevant to the current game state, and labels it with a task-centric predicate structure. This labeled text is then used to bias an action selection policy for the game, guiding it towards promising regions of the action space. We encode our model for text analysis and game playing in a multi-layer neural network, representing linguistic decisions via latent variables in the hidden layers, and game action quality via the output layer. Operating within the Monte-Carlo Search framework, we estimate model parameters using feedback from simulated games. We apply our approach to the complex strategy game Civilization II using the official game manual as the text guide. Our results show that a linguistically-informed game-playing agent significantly outperforms its language-unaware counterpart, yielding a 34 absolute improvement and winning over 65 of games when playing against the built-in AI of Civilization.
There has been a growing interest on machine learning from natural language instructions. Much work has been done in the setting where an autonomous agent learns to complete a task in an environment, for example, learning to play games by utilizing text manuals @cite_10 @cite_37 @cite_32 and guiding policy learning using high-level human advice @cite_33 @cite_27 @cite_38 . Recently, natural language explanations have been used to augment labeled examples for concept learning @cite_4 and to help induce programs that solve algebraic word problems @cite_5 . Our work is similar in that natural language is used as additional supervision during learning, however, our natural language annotations consist of user feedback on system predictions instead of explanations of the training data.