Abstract Syntax Networks for Code Generation and Semantic Parsing

Tasks like code generation and semantic parsing require mapping unstructured (or partially structured) inputs to well-formed, executable outputs. We introduce abstract syntax networks, a modeling framework for these problems. The outputs are represented as abstract syntax trees (ASTs) and constructed by a decoder with a dynamically-determined modular structure paralleling the structure of the output tree. On the benchmark Hearthstone dataset for code generation, our model obtains 79.2 BLEU and 22.7% exact match accuracy, compared to previous state-of-the-art values of 67.1 and 6.1%. Furthermore, we perform competitively on the Atis, Jobs, and Geo semantic parsing datasets with no task-specific engineering.Comment: ACL 2017. MR and MS contributed equall

Deep Tree Transductions - A Short Survey

The paper surveys recent extensions of the Long-Short Term Memory networks to handle tree structures from the perspective of learning non-trivial forms of isomorph structured transductions. It provides a discussion of modern TreeLSTM models, showing the effect of the bias induced by the direction of tree processing. An empirical analysis is performed on real-world benchmarks, highlighting how there is no single model adequate to effectively approach all transduction problems.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 2019 INNS Big Data and Deep Learning (INNSBDDL 2019). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1809.0909

A Syntactic Neural Model for General-Purpose Code Generation

We consider the problem of parsing natural language descriptions into source code written in a general-purpose programming language like Python. Existing data-driven methods treat this problem as a language generation task without considering the underlying syntax of the target programming language. Informed by previous work in semantic parsing, in this paper we propose a novel neural architecture powered by a grammar model to explicitly capture the target syntax as prior knowledge. Experiments find this an effective way to scale up to generation of complex programs from natural language descriptions, achieving state-of-the-art results that well outperform previous code generation and semantic parsing approaches.Comment: To appear in ACL 201

Learning to Parse and Translate Improves Neural Machine Translation

There has been relatively little attention to incorporating linguistic prior to neural machine translation. Much of the previous work was further constrained to considering linguistic prior on the source side. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model, called NMT+RNNG, that learns to parse and translate by combining the recurrent neural network grammar into the attention-based neural machine translation. Our approach encourages the neural machine translation model to incorporate linguistic prior during training, and lets it translate on its own afterward. Extensive experiments with four language pairs show the effectiveness of the proposed NMT+RNNG.Comment: Accepted as a short paper at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2017