Conversations with Data: Toward more Interactive Natural Language Interfaces

Automatic translation of natural language to programs to interact with data and services has been the “holy grail” of human-computer interaction, information retrieval and natural language understanding for decades. While early attempts of building natural language interfaces (NLIs) have struggled to achieve the expected success, the last several years have seen a major resurgence of interest in them. The horizon of NLIs has also expanded from databases to knowledge bases, robots, Internet of Things (via virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa), Web service APIs, general programmatic contexts and more. In this talk, I will describe some of our recent work that aims to improve natural language interfaces along two dimensions (a) increase accuracy by leveraging rich contextual data, and (b) enable users to interactively use the system, refining and repairing mistakes to reach their goals.