semantic parser
Supplementary Material for Grammar-Based Grounded Lexicon Learning
In the supplementary material, we describe the domain specific languages used in our experiments (Section 1), demonstrate how the proposed CKY-E2 method works by a concrete example (Section 2.1), show formal properties of CKY-E2 (Section 2.2), present dataset setups and analyze model behaviors (Section 3), and list environmental details for experiments (Section??). In this section, we will present and discuss the domain-specific languages (DSLs) we use for two domains: visual reasoning and language-guided navigation. We will further introduce the neurosymbolic module we have designed for executing programs in these two domains. Overall, each DSL contains a set of types and a set of deterministic modules that have been manually designed for realizing necessary operations in these domains. However, in contrast to realizing them as we do in standard programming languages (with for-loops and if-conditions), we will be using tensor operations (e.g., tensor additions and multiplications) to realize them so that the output of each program is differentiable with respect to all of its inputs. We refer readers to the original papers for a detailed introduction to the DSL and neuro-symbolic program execution. Here we only highlight the key aspects of our language and its neuro-symbolic realization, and discuss the difference between our implementation and the ones in original papers. Our visual reasoning DSL is a subset of CLEVR, containing 6 types and 8 primitive operations. Table 1 illustrates all 6 types and how they are internally represented in neuro-symbolic execution. Table 2 further shows all operations in the DSL. There are two main differences between the DSL used by G2L2 and the original CLEVRDSL.
A Theorem-Proving-Based Evaluation of Neural Semantic Parsing
Funakura, Hayate, Kim, Hyunsoo, Mineshima, Koji
Graph-matching metrics such as Smatch are the de facto standard for evaluating neural semantic parsers, yet they capture surface overlap rather than logical equivalence. We reassess evaluation by pairing graph-matching with automated theorem proving. We compare two approaches to building parsers: supervised fine-tuning (T5-Small/Base) and few-shot in-context learning (GPT-4o/4.1/5), under normalized and unnormalized targets. We evaluate outputs using graph-matching, bidirectional entailment between source and target formulas with a first-order logic theorem prover, and well-formedness. Across settings, we find that models performing well on graph-matching often fail to produce logically equivalent formulas. Normalization reduces incidental target variability, improves well-formedness, and strengthens logical adequacy. Error analysis shows performance degrades with increasing formula complexity and with coordination, prepositional phrases, and passive voice; the dominant failures involve variable binding and indexing, and predicate naming. These findings highlight limits of graph-based metrics for reasoning-oriented applications and motivate logic-sensitive evaluation and training objectives together with simplified, normalized target representations. All code and data for our experiments are publicly available.
Is neural semantic parsing good at ellipsis resolution, or isn't it?
Neural semantic parsers have shown good overall performance for a variety of linguistic phenomena, reaching semantic matching scores of more than 90%. But how do such parsers perform on strongly context-sensitive phenomena, where large pieces of semantic information need to be duplicated to form a meaningful semantic representation? A case in point is English verb phrase ellipsis, a construct where entire verb phrases can be abbreviated by a single auxiliary verb. Are the otherwise known as powerful semantic parsers able to deal with ellipsis or aren't they? We constructed a corpus of 120 cases of ellipsis with their fully resolved meaning representation and used this as a challenge set for a large battery of neural semantic parsers. Although these parsers performed very well on the standard test set, they failed in the instances with ellipsis. Data augmentation helped improve the parsing results. The reason for the difficulty of parsing elided phrases is not that copying semantic material is hard, but that usually occur in linguistically complicated contexts causing most of the parsing errors.
Reviews: Visual Concept-Metaconcept Learning
Overall this is a really interesting idea incorporating concrete visual concepts and more abstract metaconcepts in a joint space and using the learning of one to guide the other. There are some issues below, mostly details about training implementation, that could clear up my questions. 1. Why not use pretrained word embeddings for the GRU model? The issue here is that the object proposal generator was trained on ImageNet, meaning it almost definitely had access to visual information about the held out concepts in Ctest. The GRU baseline, even signficantly less training data, outperforms for instance-of.
Compositional Instruction Following with Language Models and Reinforcement Learning
Cohen, Vanya, Tasse, Geraud Nangue, Gopalan, Nakul, James, Steven, Gombolay, Matthew, Mooney, Ray, Rosman, Benjamin
Combining reinforcement learning with language grounding is challenging as the agent needs to explore the environment while simultaneously learning multiple language-conditioned tasks. To address this, we introduce a novel method: the compositionally-enabled reinforcement learning language agent (CERLLA). Our method reduces the sample complexity of tasks specified with language by leveraging compositional policy representations and a semantic parser trained using reinforcement learning and in-context learning. We evaluate our approach in an environment requiring function approximation and demonstrate compositional generalization to novel tasks. Our method significantly outperforms the previous best non-compositional baseline in terms of sample complexity on 162 tasks designed to test compositional generalization. Our model attains a higher success rate and learns in fewer steps than the non-compositional baseline. It reaches a success rate equal to an oracle policy's upper-bound performance of 92%. With the same number of environment steps, the baseline only reaches a success rate of 80%.
Understanding the Effect of Algorithm Transparency of Model Explanations in Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing
Rai, Daking, Weiland, Rydia R., Herrera, Kayla Margaret Gabriella, Shaw, Tyler H., Yao, Ziyu
Explaining the decisions of AI has become vital for fostering appropriate user trust in these systems. This paper investigates explanations for a structured prediction task called ``text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing'', which translates a natural language question into a structured query language (SQL) program. In this task setting, we designed three levels of model explanation, each exposing a different amount of the model's decision-making details (called ``algorithm transparency''), and investigated how different model explanations could potentially yield different impacts on the user experience. Our study with $\sim$100 participants shows that (1) the low-/high-transparency explanations often lead to less/more user reliance on the model decisions, whereas the medium-transparency explanations strike a good balance. We also show that (2) only the medium-transparency participant group was able to engage further in the interaction and exhibit increasing performance over time, and that (3) they showed the least changes in trust before and after the study.
Semantic Parsing with Candidate Expressions for Knowledge Base Question Answering
Nam, Daehwan, Lee, Gary Geunbae
Semantic parsers convert natural language to logical forms, which can be evaluated on knowledge bases (KBs) to produce denotations. Recent semantic parsers have been developed with sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) pre-trained language models (PLMs) or large language models, where the models treat logical forms as sequences of tokens. For syntactic and semantic validity, the semantic parsers use grammars that enable constrained decoding. However, the grammars lack the ability to utilize large information of KBs, although logical forms contain representations of KB elements, such as entities or relations. In this work, we propose a grammar augmented with candidate expressions for semantic parsing on a large KB with a seq2seq PLM. The grammar defines actions as production rules, and our semantic parser predicts actions during inference under the constraints by types and candidate expressions. We apply the grammar to knowledge base question answering, where the constraints by candidate expressions assist a semantic parser to generate valid KB elements. In experiments on two benchmarks, KQA Pro and Overnight, the constraints by candidate expressions increased the accuracy of our semantic parser, whether it was trained with strong supervision or weak supervision. Our semantic parser achieved state-of-the-art accuracies on KQA Pro and Overnight, and its implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/daehwannam/candexpr-sp.git.