PMB5: Gaining More Insight into Neural Semantic Parsing with Challenging Benchmarks
This work addresses the issue of overestimated model capabilities in semantic processing for researchers and practitioners, highlighting limitations in handling longer texts and compositional generalization, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarks.
The authors tackled the problem of inflated performance scores in neural semantic parsing and text generation on the Parallel Meaning Bank by introducing more systematic data splits and challenging test sets, resulting in significant performance declines (e.g., dramatic drops) on these new benchmarks.
The Parallel Meaning Bank (PMB) serves as a corpus for semantic processing with a focus on semantic parsing and text generation. Currently, we witness an excellent performance of neural parsers and generators on the PMB. This might suggest that such semantic processing tasks have by and large been solved. We argue that this is not the case and that performance scores from the past on the PMB are inflated by non-optimal data splits and test sets that are too easy. In response, we introduce several changes. First, instead of the prior random split, we propose a more systematic splitting approach to improve the reliability of the standard test data. Second, except for the standard test set, we also propose two challenge sets: one with longer texts including discourse structure, and one that addresses compositional generalization. We evaluate five neural models for semantic parsing and meaning-to-text generation. Our results show that model performance declines (in some cases dramatically) on the challenge sets, revealing the limitations of neural models when confronting such challenges.