Papers with semantic parser
Meta-Learning a Cross-lingual Manifold for Semantic Parsing (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has found success with machine translation or zero-shot methods . however, these approaches can struggle to model how native speakers ask questions . |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning algorithm to leverage minimal annotated examples in new languages for few-shot cross-lingual semantic parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach trains a parser with maximum sample efficiency in six languages on ATIS. |
Compositional generalization with a broad-coverage semantic parser (2022.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that compositional generalization on COGS is difficult and complex. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional semantic parser that solves compositional generalization on COGS dataset. |
| Outcome: | The AM parser solves compositional generalization on the COGS dataset. |
Semantic Parsing with Dual Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to parse natural language queries are limited by lack of labeled data and constrained decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parsing framework with the dual learning algorithm that makes full use of data through a dual-learning game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on ATIS dataset and gets competitive performance on overnight dataset. |
Turkish Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | UCCA-annotated datasets have been released in English, French, and German . a semi-automatic annotation approach is used to annotate the datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose to use an external semantic parser to annotate Turkish sentences . they use the same parsers for evaluation purposes and conducted experiments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first UCCA-annotated Turkish dataset . the results show that the parser can improve on the initial annotations . |
EUSP: An Easy-to-Use Semantic Parsing PlatForm (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Semantic parsing aims to map natural language utterances into structured meaning representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular platform that allows developers to build semantic parser from scratch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform achieves competitive performance on semantic parsing task and improves performance of a business search engine. |
Multilingual Neural Semantic Parsing for Low-Resourced Languages (2021.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | a large amount of training data is needed to understand multilingual semantic parsing models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use machine translation to bootstrap multilingual training data from English data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on human-written sentences and the state-of-the-art models on the public NLMaps dataset. |
Bridging the Gap between Synthetic and Natural Questions via Sentence Decomposition for Semantic Parsing (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a parser to perform zero-shot learning are limited by the lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposition-based method to unify the sentence structures of questions . their method can generalize to natural questions with novel text expressions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on synthetic data and on complex web questions with novel expressions. |
SmBoP: Semi-autoregressive Bottom-up Semantic Parsing (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsers decode syntax using a top-down depth-first traversal. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-autoregressive bottom-up parser that constructs at decoding step t the top-K sub-trees of height t. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.2x speed-up in decoding time and 5x speed up in training time on a zero-shot semantic parsing benchmark. |
Sketch-Driven Regular Expression Generation from Natural Language and Examples (2020.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent systems for converting natural language descriptions into regexes have achieved some success, but typically deal with short, formulaic text and can only produce simple regexe. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for regex synthesis in a context where both natural language and examples are available. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on two prior datasets and a real-world dataset, which existing neural systems completely fail on. |
Bootstrapping a Crosslingual Semantic Parser (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in semantic parsing are limited to English but professional translation can be prohibitively expensive. |
| Approach: | They adapt a semantic parser trained on a single language to new languages and multiple domains with minimal annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves parsing accuracy within 2% of translation using only 50% of training data. |
Contextual Semantic Parsing for Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogues (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting state of a conversation are limited to a few languages . a method that can be applied to other languages will benefit the large population of speakers of many other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically translate large-scale dialogue data sets in one language to produce an effective semantic parser for other languages using machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the compounding effect of translation errors without harming the accuracy in practice. |
Look-up and Adapt: A One-shot Semantic Parser (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current conversational agents such as Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant do not cater to the specific phrasing of a user or the specific action. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parser that generalizes to out-of-domain examples by adapting the logical forms of seen utterances to fit an unseen utterant. |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser improves on one-shot parsing by 68.8% compared to baselines . it adapts the logical forms of seen utterances to fit the unseen utterant . |
Learning Joint Semantic Parsers from Disjoint Data (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Various formal meaning representations have been developed corresponding to different semantic theories. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn a semantic parser from multiple datasets by treating annotations for unobserved formalisms as latent structured variables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on existing methods using unobserved formalisms and underlying corpora. |
Semantic Parsing of Disfluent Speech (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Semantic parsing is a key component for understanding user utterances in voice assistants . however, most research on disfluent speech is focused on written text . |
| Approach: | They investigate semantic parsing of disfluent speech with the ATIS dataset . they add real and synthetic disfluencies at training time to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser outperforms the state-of-the-art parsers on the ATIS dataset in terms of performance and accuracy. |
Span-based Hierarchical Semantic Parsing for Task-Oriented Dialog (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsers score intents and slots as labels of nesting nodes, but decode a valid tree globally. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based semantic parser for parsing compositional utterances into Task Oriented Parse (TOP) the parsers score labels of the tree nodes covering each token span independently, but decode a valid tree globally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser outperforms previous methods on the TOP dataset in accuracy and training speed. |
Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing with Abstract Examples (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | training semantic parsers from weak supervision complicates training in two ways . spurious programs that accidentally lead to a correct denotation add noise to training . |
| Approach: | They propose to use tokens in both language utterance and program to map denotations to executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance and reaches 82.5% accuracy compared to the best reported accuracy so far. |
AMR dependency parsing with a typed semantic algebra (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs) are graphs which describe the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parser which parses strings into tree representations of the compositional structure of an AMR graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser outperforms baselines and standard neural techniques for supertagging and dependency tree parsing. |
Training Classifiers with Natural Language Explanations (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | a semantic parser converts explanations into programmatic labeling functions . a standard protocol for obtaining a labeled dataset provides only one bit of information per example . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where an annotator provides an explanation for each labeling decision . they use a semantic parser to convert these explanations into programmatic labeling functions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework trains classifiers faster by providing explanations instead of labels . the proposed framework is based on a rule-based semantic parser . |
Question Generation from SQL Queries Improves Neural Semantic Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using question generation, we learn a semantic parser with 30% of the supervised training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question generation to learn a semantic parser with less supervised training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art model with less training data. |
Program Synthesis for Complex QA on Charts via Probabilistic Grammar Based Filtered Iterative Back-Translation (2023.findings-eacl)
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Shabbirhussain Bhaisaheb, Shubham Paliwal, Rajaswa Patil, Manasi Patwardhan, Lovekesh Vig, Gautam Shroff
| Challenge: | Current chart-based Question Answering approaches address structural, visual or simple data retrieval-type questions with fixed-vocabulary answers. |
| Approach: | They employ a neural semantic parser to transform NL questions into SQL programs . they use a probabilistic context-free grammar to generate NL queries from a schema . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves State-of-the-Art (SOTA) results on reasoning-based queries. |
Decoupling Structure and Lexicon for Zero-Shot Semantic Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training semantic parsers in new domains require expensive supervision and lack the ability to generalize to new domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach to parsing utterances in unseen domains . they map an utterant to an abstract, domain independent, logical form and replace slots with KB constants based on lexical alignment scores and global inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 53.4% accuracy on 7 domains in the OVERNIGHT dataset, significantly better than other zero-shot baselines and performs as good as a parser trained on over 30% of the target domain examples. |
Learning to Learn Semantic Parsers from Natural Language Supervision (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing logical forms require a user to be familiar with the underlying structure to learn a semantic parser. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for training semantic parsers from natural language feedback . they use natural language inputs to parse feedback to leverage it as a form of supervision . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm learns a semantic parser from users’ corrections expressed in natural language. |
Learning to Synthesize Data for Semantic Parsing (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for synthesizing data for semantic parsing require handcrafted rules to synthesize new programs or utterance-program pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a (non-neural) PCFG to model the composition of programs and a BART-based translation model to map a program to an utterance to learn a generative model from existing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be efficiently learned from existing data on benchmarks of GeoQuery and Spider. |
Improving Compositional Generalization in Semantic Parsing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generalization of models to out-of-distribution data has sparked substantial interest . compositional generalization is the ability to systematically generalize to test examples composed of components seen during training . |
| Approach: | They propose to extend compositional generalization in semantic parsing by using contextual representations and training attention to agree with pre-computed token alignments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extensions improve compositional generalization on OOD compositions. |
Privacy-Preserving Domain Adaptation of Semantic Parsers (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Task-oriented dialogue systems often assist users with personal or confidential matters . a lack of privacy controls prevents developers from observing actual usage . authors propose a method to generate realistic user utterances synthetically without compromising privacy . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates latent semantic parses and generates utterances based on the parses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves MAUVE by 2.5X and parse tree function-type overlap by 1.3X . it also shows gains of 8.5% points on its accuracy with the new feature . |
Grounding language acquisition by training semantic parsers using captioned videos (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a new method for parsing sentences using captioned videos is being developed . we use video clips to ground the semantics of language, but without annotations . |
| Approach: | They develop a semantic parser that is trained in a grounded setting using captioned videos . they use a corpus of sentences paired with videos without other annotations to train it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser recovers the meaning of English sentences despite no annotations . learning a grounded semantic parsers can expand the range of data that parseurs can be trained on . |
LINC: A Neurosymbolic Approach for Logical Reasoning by Combining Language Models with First-Order Logic Provers (2023.emnlp-main)
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Theo Olausson, Alex Gu, Ben Lipkin, Cedegao Zhang, Armando Solar-Lezama, Joshua Tenenbaum, Roger Levy
| Challenge: | Logical reasoning is an important task for artificial intelligence, says a new study . many prompting-based strategies to enable large language models fail in subtle and unpredictable ways. |
| Approach: | They propose to reformulate logical reasoning tasks by leveraging large language models . they use a modular neurosymbolic programming approach to translate premises and conclusions from natural language to logic . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms open-source models on FOLIO and ProofWriter while showing distinct failure modes. |
Leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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Pavan Kapanipathi, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Srinivas Ravishankar, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Maria Chang, Cristina Cornelio, Saswati Dana, Achille Fokoue, Dinesh Garg, Alfio Gliozzo, Sairam Gurajada, Hima Karanam, Naweed Khan, Dinesh Khandelwal, Young-Suk Lee, Yunyao Li, Francois Luus, Ndivhuwo Makondo, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Tahira Naseem, Sumit Neelam, Lucian Popa, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Ryan Riegel, Gaetano Rossiello, Udit Sharma, G P Shrivatsa Bhargav, Mo Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches face challenges including complex question understanding and lack of large end-to-end training datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular knowledge base question answering system that leverages AMR parses for task-independent question understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance on two prominent KBQA datasets based on DBpedia. |
Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over Wikidata (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models can answer many questions correctly, but can also hallucinate and give wrong answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answering benchmark for Wikidata that uses SPARQL to ground large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art for QALD-7 by 3.6% in F1 score. |
ALICE: Active Learning with Contrastive Natural Language Explanations (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Annotating a large dataset with annotations is costly and infeasible. |
| Approach: | They propose an expert-in-the-loop training framework that utilizes contrastive natural language explanations to improve data efficiency in learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models trained with 40-100% more training data on bird species classification and social relationship classification tasks. |
A Pilot Study for Chinese SQL Semantic Parsing (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets to map natural language text into SQL are limited in their use in question-to-sql mapping. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese-based semantic parser to map natural language text into SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset compares a character-based parser with a word embedding scheme for Chinese . the results show that the parsers are subject to segmentation errors and cross-lingual embedders are useful for text-to-SQL mapping. |
Global Reasoning over Database Structures for Text-to-SQL Parsing (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsers only select a set of database constants at training time . current models only consider local information, not global ones . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parser that globally reasons about the structure of the query to make a more contextually-informed selection of database constants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases accuracy from 39.4% to 47.4% on a zero-shot semantic parsing dataset with complex databases. |
Verifiable, Debuggable, and Repairable Commonsense Logical Reasoning via LLM-based Theory Resolution (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to substantial interest in their application to commonsense reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a logical reasoning framework that integrates commonsense knowledge with a verifiable logical framework that mitigates hallucinations and facilitates debugging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three language-based reasoning tasks and improves accuracy and reasoning correctness. |
Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing with Execution-based Spurious Program Filtering (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a semantic parser from weak supervision focus on exploiting similarities between examples based on domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-agnostic filtering mechanism based on program execution results to identify and filter out programs with significantly different semantics from the other programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of existing weakly-supervised parsers by incorporating a majority vote on the program search results. |
Understanding Unnatural Questions Improves Reasoning over Text (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Complex question answering (CQA) requires large amounts of human-annotated data . learning effective CQA requires large amount of human annotated . |
| Approach: | They propose to map human-generated questions into unnatural machine-generated ones . they generate synthetic pairs and train a parser that associates synthetic questions with their corresponding action sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model trained on human-labeled data. |
Zero-Shot Semantic Parsing for Instructions (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, such as chatbots or "intelligent personal assistants" |
| Approach: | They propose a new training algorithm that trains a semantic parser on examples from a set of source domains and augment it with features and a logical form candidate filtering logic to support zero-shot adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better than a non-adapted parser with features and logical form candidate filtering logic. |
Unified Semantic Parsing with Weak Supervision (P19-1)
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Priyanka Agrawal, Ayushi Dalmia, Parag Jain, Abhishek Bansal, Ashish Mittal, Karthik Sankaranarayanan
| Challenge: | Semantic parsing over multiple knowledge bases requires high-quality annotations of (utterance, program) pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to build a unified multi-domain enabled semantic parser with weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance by 20% on the Overnight dataset. |
Localizing Open-Ontology QA Semantic Parsers in a Day Using Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new toolkit for localizing a semantic parser for a language is proposed . the proposed approach is based on a method for question answering systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that leverages Neural Machine Translation systems to localize a semantic parser for a new language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 10 new languages . it can be deployed in restaurants and hotels in less than 24 hours . |
SPOT: Zero-Shot Semantic Parsing Over Property Graphs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are becoming increasingly popular as a means of storing structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate training data for semantic parsing over Property Graphs without human annotations by matching tree patterns to the KG and paraphrasing the query program with an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates training data for parsing over Property Graphs without human annotations on two property graph benchmarks utilizing the Cypher query language. |
Identifying Domain Adjacent Instances for Semantic Parsers (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic parsers map text to logical forms, which can then be used by downstream components to fulfill an action. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple sentence representation that emphasizes unexpected words . they formalize domain-adjacency problem and propose logical form representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of a downstream semantic parser on in-domain and domain-adjacent instances. |
Data-Anonymous Encoding for Text-to-SQL Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to handle table-related tokens before the semantic parser are not efficient . existing approaches ignore handling table- related tokens or use deterministic approaches based on string-match or word embedding similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a more efficient approach to handle table-related tokens before the parser . they propose tagging a sequential tabbing problem and an implicit supervision approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms deterministic approaches. |
Grounded Adaptation for Zero-shot Executable Semantic Parsing (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsers are usually engineered for each application environment, but they struggle when deployed to a new database. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adapt existing semantic parsers to new environments . they propose combining a forward semantic parsed with a backward utterance generator to synthesize data in the new environment and select cycle-consistent examples to adapt the parser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure outperforms data-augmentation and improves execution accuracy on the Spider, Sparc, and CoSQL zero-shot semantic parsing tasks. |
An Imitation Game for Learning Semantic Parsers from User Interaction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning semantic parsers are expensive and tedious . despite the widespread applications, bootstrapping and fine-tuning is tedious a task . |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative method for learning semantic parsers directly from users . they propose an annotation-efficient imitation learning algorithm that iteratively collects new datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is cost-effective and shows promising performance on the text-to-SQL problem. |
Parsing into Variable-in-situ Logico-Semantic Graphs (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new type of graph-based meaning representation allows analysis for scope-related phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose variable-in-situ logico-semantic graphs to bridge gap between semantic graph and logical form parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph-based meaning representation achieves 92.39% accuracy in terms of elementary dependency match . the output of the proposed parser is highly coherent . |
RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing models struggle to generalize to unseen database schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to address schema encoding, schema linking, and feature representation within a text-to-SQL encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the match accuracy to 57.2% on the spider dataset, surpassing its best counterparts by 8.7%. |
From Parse-Execute to Parse-Execute-Refine: Improving Semantic Parser for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parsing knowledge-base questions into executable logical forms have not been successful on complex KBQA. |
| Approach: | They propose a new semantic parser called KoPL to model the reasoning processes . they propose 'parse-execute-refine' paradigm to unlock reasoning ability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser performs better than the state-of-the-art on complex KBQA . the proposed parsed-execute-refine paradigm can model complex reasoning steps . |
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision. |
Semantic Decomposition of Question and SQL for Text-to-SQL Parsing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models for complex queries are limited by the syntactic complexity of SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a question decomposition language that decomposes SQL queries into simple and regular sub-queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language decomposes SQL queries into simple and regular sub-queries . it is more accessible to non-experts for complex queries, enabling interpretable output . |