Sam Thomson

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Semantic Machines

My research focuses on graph representations of natural language semantics. I develop techniques to accurately parse text into semantic graphs.

I received my Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute, CMU, where I was advised by Noah Smith.

Publications

• Benchclamp: A Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models on Semantic Parsing
  Subhro Roy, Sam Thomson, Tongfei Chen, Richard Shin, Adam Pauls, Jason Eisner, and Benjamin Van Durme
  In NeurIPS 2023 (Datasets and Benchmarks), New Orleans, LA, September 2023. (paper)
• Toward Interactive Dictation
  Belinda Z. Li, Jason Eisner, Adam Pauls, and Sam Thomson
  In ACL 2023, Toronto, Canada, July 2023. (paper)
• When More Data Hurts: A Troubling Quirk in Developing Broad-Coverage Natural Language Understanding Systems
  Elias Stengel-Eskin, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Adam Pauls, Sam Thomson, Hao Fang, Benjamin Van Durme, Jason Eisner, Yu Su
  In EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi, UAE, December, 2022. (paper)
• Guided K-best Selection for Semantic Parsing Annotation
  Anton Belyy, Chieh-yang Huang, Jacob Andreas, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Sam Thomson, Richard Shin, Subhro Roy, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Charles Chen, Benjamin Van Durme
  In ACL 2022 (Demo), Dublin, Ireland, May, 2022. (paper)
• Online Semantic Parsing for Latency Reduction in Task-Oriented Dialogue
  Jiawei Zhou, Jason Eisner, Michael Newman, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, and Sam Thomson
  In ACL 2022 (Outstanding Paper), Dublin, Ireland, May 2022. (paper, code)
• Constrained Language Models Yield Few-Shot Semantic Parsers
  Richard Shin, Christopher H. Lin, Sam Thomson, Charles Chen, Subhro Roy, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Adam Pauls, Dan Klein, Jason Eisner, and Benjamin Van Durme
  In EMNLP 2021, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, November 2021. (paper, code)
• Value-Agnostic Conversational Semantic Parsing
  Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Adam Pauls, Subhro Roy, Yuchen Zhang, Alexander Kyte, Alan Guo, Sam Thomson, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Jason Wolfe, Jacob Andreas, and Dan Klein
  In ACL 2021, Online, August 2021. (paper, data)
• Compositional Generalization for Neural Semantic Parsing via Span-level Supervised Attention
  Pengcheng Yin, Hao Fang, Graham Neubig, Adam Pauls, Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Yu Su, Sam Thomson, and Jacob Andreas
  In NAACL 2021, Online, June 2021. (paper)
• Task-Oriented Dialogue as Dataflow Synthesis
  Semantic Machines, Jacob Andreas, John Bufe, David Burkett, Charles Chen, Josh Clausman, Jean Crawford, Kate Crim, Jordan DeLoach, Leah Dorner, Jason Eisner, Hao Fang, Alan Guo, David Hall, Kristin Hayes, Kellie Hill, Diana Ho, Wendy Iwaszuk, Smriti Jha, Dan Klein, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Theo Lanman, Percy Liang, Christopher H. Lin, Ilya Lintsbakh, Andy McGovern, Aleksandr Nisnevich, Adam Pauls, Dmitrij Petters, Brent Read, Dan Roth, Subhro Roy, Jesse Rusak, Beth Short, Div Slomin, Ben Snyder, Stephon Striplin, Yu Su, Zachary Tellman, Sam Thomson, Andrei Vorobev, Izabela Witoszko, Jason Wolfe, Abby Wray, Yuchen Zhang, and Alexander Zotov
  In TACL 2020, September 2020. (paper, code, data, talk, blog, bib)
• Encoding and Decoding Graph Representations of Natural Language
  Sam Thomson.
  Thesis, Pittsburgh, PA, March 2019. (pdf, bib)
• Rational Recurrences
  Hao Peng, Roy Schwartz, Sam Thomson, and Noah A. Smith.
  In EMNLP 2018, Brussels, Belgium, November 2018. (pdf, bib, code)
• Syntactic Scaffolds for Semantic Structures
  Swabha Swayamdipta, Sam Thomson, Kenton Lee, Luke Zettlemoyer, Chris Dyer, and Noah A. Smith.
  In EMNLP 2018, Brussels, Belgium, November 2018. (pdf, bib, code)
• SoPa: Bridging CNNs, RNNs, and Weighted Finite-State Machines
  Roy Schwartz^*, Sam Thomson^*, and Noah A. Smith.
  In ACL 2018, Melbourne, Australia, July 2018. (pdf, bib, code)
• Backpropagating through Structured Argmax using a SPIGOT
  Hao Peng, Sam Thomson, and Noah A. Smith.
  In ACL 2018, Melbourne, Australia, July 2018. (pdf, supp, bib, code)
• Neural Motifs: Scene Graph Parsing with Global Context
  Rowan Zellers, Mark Yatskar, Sam Thomson, and Yejin Choi.
  In CVPR 2018, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 2018. (preprint, bib, project, code )
• Learning Joint Semantic Parsers from Disjoint Data
  Hao Peng, Sam Thomson, Swabha Swayamdipta, and Noah A. Smith.
  In NAACL 2018, New Orleans, Louisiana, June 2018. (pdf, bib, code, talk)
• Frame-Semantic Parsing with Softmax-Margin Segmental RNNs and a Syntactic Scaffold
  Swabha Swayamdipta, Sam Thomson, Chris Dyer, and Noah A. Smith.
  arXiv, June 2017. (preprint, bib, code)
• Deep Multitask Learning for Semantic Dependency Parsing
  Hao Peng, Sam Thomson, and Noah A. Smith.
  In ACL 2017, Vancouver, Canada, July 2017. (pdf, bib, code)
• Frame-Semantic Role Labeling with Heterogeneous Annotations
  Meghana Kshirsagar, Sam Thomson, Nathan Schneider, Jaime Carbonell, Noah A. Smith, and Chris Dyer.
  In ACL 2015, Beijing, China, July 2015. (pdf, bib, code)
• Toward Abstractive Summarization Using Semantic Representations
  Fei Liu, Jeffrey Flanigan Sam Thomson, Norman Sadeh, and Noah A. Smith.
  In NAACL 2015, Denver, CO, May 2015. (pdf, bib)
• CMU: Arc-Factored, Discriminative Semantic Dependency Parsing
  Sam Thomson, Brendan O'Connor, Jeffrey Flanigan, David Bamman, Jesse Dodge, Swabha Swayamdipta, Nathan Schneider, Chris Dyer and Noah A. Smith.
  In SemEval 2014, Dublin, Ireland, August 2014. (pdf, bib, code)
• Graph-based Algorithms for Semantic Parsing
  Jeffrey Flanigan, Sam Thomson, David Bamman, Jesse Dodge, Manaal Faruqui, Brendan O'Connor, Nathan Schneider, Swabha Swayamdipta, Chris Dyer and Noah A. Smith.
  In ACL 2014 Workshop on Semantic Parsing, Baltimore, MD, June 2014.
• A Discriminative Graph-Based Parser for the Abstract Meaning Representation
  Jeffrey Flanigan, Sam Thomson, Jaime Carbonell, Chris Dyer and Noah A. Smith.
  In ACL 2014 (Best Long Paper Honorable Mention), Baltimore, MD, June 2014. (pdf, bib, code)

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