Enforcing Consistency in Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing

Nitish Gupta, Sameer Singh, Matt Gardner


Abstract
The predominant challenge in weakly supervised semantic parsing is that of spurious programs that evaluate to correct answers for the wrong reasons. Prior work uses elaborate search strategies to mitigate the prevalence of spurious programs; however, they typically consider only one input at a time. In this work we explore the use of consistency between the output programs for related inputs to reduce the impact of spurious programs. We bias the program search (and thus the model’s training signal) towards programs that map the same phrase in related inputs to the same sub-parts in their respective programs. Additionally, we study the importance of designing logical formalisms that facilitate this kind of consistency-based training. We find that a more consistent formalism leads to improved model performance even without consistency-based training. When combined together, these two insights lead to a 10% absolute improvement over the best prior result on the Natural Language Visual Reasoning dataset.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
168–174
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nitish Gupta, Sameer Singh, and Matt Gardner. 2021. Enforcing Consistency in Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 168–174, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enforcing Consistency in Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing (Gupta et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.22.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.22.mp4
Code
 nitishgupta/allennlp-semparse
Data
NLVR