Learning to Map Frequent Phrases to Sub-Structures of Meaning Representation for Neural Semantic Parsing

2020-06-02

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34

Volume

Vol. 34 No. 05: AAAI-20 Technical Tracks 5

AAAI Technical Track: Natural Language Processing

Neural semantic parsers usually generate meaning representation tokens from natural language tokens via an encoder-decoder model. However, there is often a vocabulary-mismatch problem between natural language utterances and logical forms. That is, one word maps to several atomic logical tokens, which need to be handled as a whole, rather than individual logical tokens at multiple steps. In this paper, we propose that the vocabulary-mismatch problem can be effectively resolved by leveraging appropriate logical tokens. Specifically, we exploit macro actions, which are of the same granularity of words/phrases, and allow the model to learn mappings from frequent phrases to corresponding sub-structures of meaning representation. Furthermore, macro actions are compact, and therefore utilizing them can significantly reduce the search space, which brings a great benefit to weakly supervised semantic parsing. Experiments show that our method leads to substantial performance improvement on three benchmarks, in both supervised and weakly supervised settings.

10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6253