Learning an Executable Neural Semantic Parser

Jianpeng Cheng, Siva Reddy, Vijay Saraswat, Mirella Lapata
2018 Computational Linguistics  
This paper describes a neural semantic parser that maps natural language utterances onto logical forms which can be executed against a task-specific environment, such as a knowledge base or a database, to produce a response. The parser generates tree-structured logical forms with a transition-based approach which combines a generic tree-generation algorithm with domain-general grammar defined by the logical language. The generation process is modeled by structured recurrent neural networks,
more » ... h provide a rich encoding of the sentential context and generation history for making predictions. To tackle mismatches between natural language and logical form tokens, various attention mechanisms are explored. Finally, we consider different training settings for the neural semantic parser, including fully supervised training where annotated logical forms are given, weakly-supervised training where denotations are provided, and distant supervision where only unlabeled sentences and a knowledge base are available. Experiments across a wide range of datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our parser. *
doi:10.1162/coli_a_00342 fatcat:smuzyli3hvfd3knkzgbb64ppf4