Weakly-supervised Semantic Parsing with Abstract Examples

Semantic parsers translate language utterances to programs, but are often trained from utterance-denotation pairs only. Consequently, parsers must overcome the problem of spuriousness at training time, where an incorrect program found at search time accidentally leads to a correct denotation. We propose that in small well-typed domains, we can semi-automatically generate an abstract representation for examples that facilitates information sharing across examples. This alleviates spuriousness, as the probability of randomly obtaining a correct answer from a program decreases across multiple examples. We test our approach on CNLVR, a challenging visual reasoning dataset, where spuriousness is central because denotations are either TRUE or FALSE, and thus random programs have high probability of leading to a correct denotation. We develop the first semantic parser for this task and reach 83.5% accuracy, a 15.7% absolute accuracy improvement compared to the best reported accuracy so far.