  In Natural Language (NL) applications, there is often a mismatch between what
the NL interface is capable of interpreting and what a lay user knows how to
express. This work describes a novel natural language interface that reduces
this mismatch by refining natural language input through successive,
automatically generated semi-structured templates. In this paper we describe
how our approach, called SKATE, uses a neural semantic parser to parse NL input
and suggest semi-structured templates, which are recursively filled to produce
fully structured interpretations. We also show how SKATE integrates with a
neural rule-generation model to interactively suggest and acquire commonsense
knowledge. We provide a preliminary coverage analysis of SKATE for the task of
story understanding, and then describe a current business use-case of the tool
in a specific domain: COVID-19 policy design.
