Semantic processing using the Hidden Vector State model

This paper discusses semantic processing using the Hidden Vector State (HVS) model. The HVS model extends the basic discrete Markov model by encoding context in each state as a vector. State transitions are then factored into a stack shift operation similar to those of a push-down automaton followed by a push of a new preterminal semantic category label. The key feature of the model is that it can capture hierarchical structure without the use of treebank data for training. Experiments have been conducted in the travel domain using the relatively simple ATIS corpus and the more complex DARPA Communicator Task. The results show that the HVS model can be robustly trained from only minimally annotated corpus data. Furthermore, when measured by its ability to extract attribute-value pairs from natural language queries in the travel domain, the HVS model outperforms a conventional finite-state semantic tagger by 4.1% in F-measure for ATIS and by 6.6% in F-measure for Communicator, suggesting that the benefit of the HVS model's ability to encode context increases as the task becomes more complex.