Genie-parser

A neural-network based semantic parser, designed to be used in conjuction with genie-toolkit, a set of tools to generate large scale semantic parsing datasets quickly.

Genie was described in the paper:

Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Parsers for Compositional Virtual Assistants
Giovanni Campagna (*), Silei Xu (*), Mehrad Moradshahi, and Monica S. Lam
Conditionally accepted to Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2019), Phoenix, AZ, June 2019.

Genie-parser is part of Almond, a research project of the Mobile and Social Computing Lab at Stanford University. You can find more information at http://almond.stanford.edu/.

Installation

genie-parser depends on numpy, Tensorflow 1.12 for Python 3, and a number of other python modules. To install the dependencies, use:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

It's recommended to install numpy from distribution packages, not pip because it's faster and more reliable.

You must also install tensor2tensor using our own fork, using the version indicated in requirements.txt. Do not install tensor2tensor from pypi, as that is not compatible.

Please see the Tensorflow documentation if you wish to use GPU acceleration. You'll need to install nvidia+cuda or amdgpu-pro+rocm drivers, and then install "tensorflow-gpu" from pip, or build Tensorflow from source.

genie-parser has been tested successfully on Fedora 25 to 28 x86_64 with CPU and Nvidia GPU acceleration, as well as Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04. On RHEL/CentOS 7, you will need to use python 3.6 from the rh-python36 software collection. On Fedora 29 and later, the default is python 3.7, which is not compatible with Tensorflow, so you will need to install python 3.6 separately.

It is also possible to use the pipenv tool to set up a virtualenv and install the dependencies inside it.

Training

To train a new model, you should do the follow:

1. Unpack the dataset (*.tsv files) into a dataset/ directory.

2. Download the word embeddings. We recommend using Glove 42B 300-dimensional, which can be downloaded from https://nlp.stanford.edu/data/glove.42B.300d.zip, or from our mirror at https://oval.cs.stanford.edu/data/glove/glove.42B.300d.zip. Set the GLOVE environment variable to the path of uncompressed text file.

   You can skip this step, in which case, the luinet-datagen script will download the recommended GloVe file automatically.

3. Prepare the working directory:

   luinet-datagen --src_data_dir ./dataset --data_dir ./workdir --thingpedia_snapshot [SNAPSHOT]
      --problem semparse_thingtalk_noquote
   

   This script computes the input dictionary, downloads a snapshot of Thingpedia, and computes a subset of the word embedding matrix corresponding to the dictionary.

   Use the optional SNAPSHOT argument to choose which Thingpedia snapshot to train against, or pass -1 for the latest content of Thingpedia. Be aware that using -1 might make the results impossible to reproduce. This script will verify that the dataset is compatible with the Thingpedia snapshot.

   The --problem parameter should be used to chosen to match the target language. The meaning is similar to that in the tensor2tensor library. See genieparser/tasks/init.py for a list of available problems.

4. Train:

   genie-trainer --data_dir ./workdir --output_dir ./workdir/model
     --model genie_copy_seq2seq
     --hparams_set 'lstm_genie'
     --hparams_overrides ''
     --decode_hparams 'beam_size=20,return_beams=true'
     --problem 'semparse_thingtalk_noquote'
     --eval_early_stopping_metric 'metrics-semparse_thingtalk_noquote/accuracy'
     --noeval_early_stopping_metric_minimize
   

   See luinet-trainer --help for a description of each options. Available hparams sets are in genieparser/layers/hparams.py, and available models are at genieparser/models/init.py.

   During training, you can use tensorboard to visualize progress:

   tensorboard --logdir ./workdir/model
   

   After training, you can extract the metrics of the best model on the validation set with:

   genie-print-metrics --output_dir ./workdir/model
     --eval_early_stopping_metric 'metrics-semparse_thingtalk_noquote/accuracy'
     --noeval_early_stopping_metric_minimize
   

5. Evaluate:

   genie-trainer --data_dir ./workdir --output_dir ./workdir/model
     --model genie_copy_seq2seq
     --hparams_set 'lstm_genie'
     --hparams_overrides ''
     --decode_hparams 'beam_size=20,return_beams=true'
     --problem 'semparse_thingtalk_noquote'
     --eval_early_stopping_metric 'metrics-semparse_thingtalk_noquote/accuracy'
     --noeval_early_stopping_metric_minimize
     --schedule evaluate
   

   Add --eval_use_test_set to use the test set instead of the validation set.

   You can also evaluate on a specific saved model (such as the best model according to the metric on the validation set) using the flag --checkpoint_path ./workdir/model/export/best/.../variables/variables

6. To deploy the model, point the server to a saved model directory from workdir/model/export/best, by writing a configuration file server.conf containing:

   [models]
   en=<path-to-saved-model>
   

   Run the server with:

   genie-server --config-file <path-to-server.conf>
   

   By default, the server runs at port 8400. You can change that by editing the server.conf file. An the example server.conf file is provided in the data folder, which describes all available options, including SSL and privilege separation.

   The server expects to connect to a TokenizerService (provided by Almond Tokenizer) on localhost, port 8888.