Recent work has shown that generation from a prompted or fine-tuned language model can perform well at semantic parsing when the output is constrained to be a valid semantic representation. We introduce BenchCLAMP, a Benchmark to evaluate Constrained LAnguage Model Parsing, that includes context-free grammars for seven semantic parsing datasets and two syntactic parsing datasets with varied output representations, as well as a constrained decoding interface to generate only valid outputs covered by these grammars. We provide low, medium, and high resource splits for each dataset, allowing accurate comparison of various language models under different data regimes. Our benchmark supports evaluation of language models using prompt-based learning as well as fine-tuning. We benchmark eight language models, including two GPT-3 variants available only through an API. Our experiments show that encoder-decoder pretrained language models can achieve similar performance or surpass state-of-the-art methods for syntactic and semantic parsing when the model output is constrained to be valid.

Voice dictation is an increasingly important text input modality. Existing systems that allow both dictation and editing-by-voice restrict their command language to flat templates invoked by trigger words. In this work, we study the feasibility of allowing users to interrupt their dictation with spoken editing commands in open-ended natural language. We introduce a new task and dataset, TERTiUS, to experiment with such systems. To support this flexibility in real-time, a system must incrementally segment and classify spans of speech as either dictation or command, and interpret the spans that are commands. We experiment with using large pre-trained language models to predict the edited text, or alternatively, to predict a small text-editing program. Experiments show a natural trade-off between model accuracy and latency: a smaller model achieves 30% end-state accuracy with 1.3 seconds of latency, while a larger model achieves 55% end-state accuracy with 7 seconds of latency.

Recurrent and convolutional neural networks comprise two distinct families of models that have proven to be useful for encoding natural language utterances. In this paper we present SoPa, a new model that aims to bridge these two approaches. SoPa combines neural representation learning with weighted finite-state automata (WFSAs) to learn a soft version of traditional surface patterns. We show that SoPa is an extension of a one-layer CNN, and that such CNNs are equivalent to a restricted version of SoPa, and accordingly, to a restricted form of WFSA. Empirically, on three text classification tasks, SoPa is comparable or better than both a BiLSTM (RNN) baseline and a CNN baseline, and is particularly useful in small data settings.