Iterative Search for Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing

Pradeep Dasigi, Matt Gardner, Shikhar Murty, Luke Zettlemoyer, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
Training semantic parsers from question-answer pairs typically involves searching over an exponentially large space of logical forms, and an unguided search can easily be misled by spurious logical forms that coincidentally evaluate to the correct answer. We propose a novel iterative training algorithm that alternates between searching for consistent logical forms and maximizing the marginal likelihood of the retrieved ones. This training scheme lets us iteratively train models that provide guidance to subsequent ones to search for logical forms of increasing complexity, thus dealing with the problem of spuriousness. We evaluate these techniques on two hard datasets: WikiTableQuestions (WTQ) and Cornell Natural Language Visual Reasoning (NLVR), and show that our training algorithm outperforms the previous best systems, on WTQ in a comparable setting, and on NLVR with significantly less supervision.
Anthology ID:
N19-1273
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2669–2680
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1273
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1273
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pradeep Dasigi, Matt Gardner, Shikhar Murty, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Eduard Hovy. 2019. Iterative Search for Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2669–2680, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Iterative Search for Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing (Dasigi et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1273.pdf
Presentation:
 N19-1273.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/361691015
Data
NLVR