Compositional Generalization and Natural Language Variation: Can a Semantic Parsing Approach Handle Both?
This addresses a key problem in semantic parsing for AI systems that need to understand diverse and structured language, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of developing a semantic parsing approach that handles both natural language variation and compositional generalization, proposing NQG-T5, a hybrid model that outperforms existing methods on non-synthetic datasets, achieving competitive results on standard evaluations.
Sequence-to-sequence models excel at handling natural language variation, but have been shown to struggle with out-of-distribution compositional generalization. This has motivated new specialized architectures with stronger compositional biases, but most of these approaches have only been evaluated on synthetically-generated datasets, which are not representative of natural language variation. In this work we ask: can we develop a semantic parsing approach that handles both natural language variation and compositional generalization? To better assess this capability, we propose new train and test splits of non-synthetic datasets. We demonstrate that strong existing approaches do not perform well across a broad set of evaluations. We also propose NQG-T5, a hybrid model that combines a high-precision grammar-based approach with a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model. It outperforms existing approaches across several compositional generalization challenges on non-synthetic data, while also being competitive with the state-of-the-art on standard evaluations. While still far from solving this problem, our study highlights the importance of diverse evaluations and the open challenge of handling both compositional generalization and natural language variation in semantic parsing.