Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization in Semantic Parsing

Bailin Wang, Mirella Lapata, Ivan Titov


Abstract
The importance of building semantic parsers which can be applied to new domains and generate programs unseen at training has long been acknowledged, and datasets testing out-of-domain performance are becoming increasingly available. However, little or no attention has been devoted to learning algorithms or objectives which promote domain generalization, with virtually all existing approaches relying on standard supervised learning. In this work, we use a meta-learning framework which targets zero-shot domain generalization for semantic parsing. We apply a model-agnostic training algorithm that simulates zero-shot parsing by constructing virtual train and test sets from disjoint domains. The learning objective capitalizes on the intuition that gradient steps that improve source-domain performance should also improve target-domain performance, thus encouraging a parser to generalize to unseen target domains. Experimental results on the (English) Spider and Chinese Spider datasets show that the meta-learning objective significantly boosts the performance of a baseline parser.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
366–379
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.33
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.33
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bailin Wang, Mirella Lapata, and Ivan Titov. 2021. Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization in Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 366–379, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization in Semantic Parsing (Wang et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.33.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.33.mp4