Practical semantic parsers are expected to understand user utterances and map them to executable programs, even when these are ambiguous. We introduce a new benchmark, AMBROSIA, which we hope will inform and inspire the development of text-to-SQL parsers capable of recognizing and interpreting ambiguous requests. Our dataset contains questions showcasing three different types of ambiguity (scope ambiguity, attachment ambiguity, and vagueness), their interpretations, and corresponding SQL queries. In each case, the ambiguity persists even when the database context is provided. This is achieved through a novel approach that involves controlled generation of databases from scratch. We benchmark various LLMs on AMBROSIA, revealing that even the most advanced models struggle to identify and interpret ambiguity in questions.

Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation. Intent misunderstandings can frustrate users and create safety risks. To address this, we propose generating multiple interpretation-answer pairs in a single structured response to ambiguous requests. Our models are trained with reinforcement learning and customized reward functions using multiple valid answers as supervision. Experiments on conversational question answering and semantic parsing demonstrate that our method achieves higher coverage of valid answers than baseline approaches. Human evaluation confirms that predicted interpretations are highly aligned with their answers. Our approach promotes transparency with explicit interpretations, achieves efficiency by requiring only one generation step, and supports downstream applications through its structured output format.

Practical semantic parsers are expected to understand user utterances and map them to executable programs, even when these are ambiguous. We introduce a new benchmark, AMBROSIA, which we hope will inform and inspire the development of text-to-SQL parsers capable of recognizing and interpreting ambiguous requests. Our dataset contains questions showcasing three different types of ambiguity (scope ambiguity, attachment ambiguity, and vagueness), their interpretations, and corresponding SQL queries. In each case, the ambiguity persists even when the database context is provided. This is achieved through a novel approach that involves controlled generation of databases from scratch.

Handling ambiguity and underspecification is an important challenge in natural language interfaces, particularly for tasks like text-to-SQL semantic parsing. We propose a modular approach that resolves ambiguity using natural language interpretations before mapping these to logical forms (e.g., SQL queries). Although LLMs excel at parsing unambiguous utterances, they show strong biases for ambiguous ones, typically predicting only preferred interpretations. We constructively exploit this bias to generate an initial set of preferred disambiguations and then apply a specialized infilling model to identify and generate missing interpretations. To train the infilling model, we introduce an annotation method that uses SQL execution to validate different meanings. Our approach improves interpretation coverage and generalizes across datasets with different annotation styles, database structures, and ambiguity types.

In the early 2000s a group of scientists at Stanford University, California, revived a grisly procedure used in the 1950s known as parabiosis. They paired living mice, young with old, peeled back their skin and stitched together their sides so the two animals shared the same blood circulatory system. A month later, they found signs of rejuvenation in the muscles and livers of the old mice. The findings, published in 2005, turned the minds of scientists, entrepreneurs and the public to the potential of young blood to rejuvenate ageing people. By 2016, enough interest had grown to prompt a US-based startup called Ambrosia to start offering pricey infusions of young plasma – the cell-free component of blood. The procedure came under fire from the US Food and Drug Administration early last year both for its lack of proven clinical benefit and for potential safety issues; Ambrosia closed, though it has recently reopened.