Transfer Learning for Neural Semantic Parsing

The goal of semantic parsing is to map natural language to a machine interpretable meaning representation language (MRL). One of the constraints that limits full exploration of deep learning technologies for semantic parsing is the lack of sufficient annotation training data. In this paper, we propose using sequence-to-sequence in a multi-task setup for semantic parsing with a focus on transfer learning. We explore three multi-task architectures for sequence-to-sequence modeling and compare their performance with an independently trained model. Our experiments show that the multi-task setup aids transfer learning from an auxiliary task with large labeled data to a target task with smaller labeled data. We see absolute accuracy gains ranging from 1.0% to 4.4% in our in- house data set, and we also see good gains ranging from 2.5% to 7.0% on the ATIS semantic parsing tasks with syntactic and semantic auxiliary tasks.Comment: Accepted for ACL Repl4NLP 201

A Deep Architecture for Semantic Parsing

Many successful approaches to semantic parsing build on top of the syntactic analysis of text, and make use of distributional representations or statistical models to match parses to ontology-specific queries. This paper presents a novel deep learning architecture which provides a semantic parsing system through the union of two neural models of language semantics. It allows for the generation of ontology-specific queries from natural language statements and questions without the need for parsing, which makes it especially suitable to grammatically malformed or syntactically atypical text, such as tweets, as well as permitting the development of semantic parsers for resource-poor languages.Comment: In Proceedings of the Semantic Parsing Workshop at ACL 2014 (forthcoming

Evaluating Semantic Parsing against a Simple Web-based Question Answering Model

Semantic parsing shines at analyzing complex natural language that involves composition and computation over multiple pieces of evidence. However, datasets for semantic parsing contain many factoid questions that can be answered from a single web document. In this paper, we propose to evaluate semantic parsing-based question answering models by comparing them to a question answering baseline that queries the web and extracts the answer only from web snippets, without access to the target knowledge-base. We investigate this approach on COMPLEXQUESTIONS, a dataset designed to focus on compositional language, and find that our model obtains reasonable performance (35 F1 compared to 41 F1 of state-of-the-art). We find in our analysis that our model performs well on complex questions involving conjunctions, but struggles on questions that involve relation composition and superlatives.Comment: *sem 201