Developing Production-Level Conversational Interfaces with Shallow Semantic Parsing

We demonstrate an end-to-end approach for building conversational interfaces from prototype to production that has proven to work well for a number of applications across diverse verticals. Our architecture improves on the standard domain-intent-entity classification hierarchy and dialogue management architecture by leveraging shallow semantic parsing. We observe that NLU systems for industry applications often require more structured representations of entity relations than provided by the standard hierarchy, yet without requiring full semantic parses which are often inaccurate on real-world conversational data. We distinguish two kinds of semantic properties that can be provided through shallow semantic parsing: entity groups and entity roles. We also provide live demos of conversational apps built for two different use cases: food ordering and meeting control.