Learning Executable Semantic Parsers for Natural Language Understanding

A long-standing goal of artificial intelligence (AI) is to build systems capable of understanding natural language. To focus the notion of "understanding" a bit, let us say the system must produce an appropriate action upon receiving an input utterance from a human. We are interested in utterances such as the ones listed here, which require deep understanding and reasoning. This article focuses on semantic parsing, an area within the field of natural language processing (NLP), which has been growing over the last decade. Semantic parsers map input utterances into semantic representations called logical forms that support this form of reasoning.