Improving Generalization in Language Model-based Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing: Two Simple Semantic Boundary-based Techniques

Daking Rai, Bailin Wang, Yilun Zhou, Ziyu Yao


Abstract
Compositional and domain generalization present significant challenges in semantic parsing, even for state-of-the-art semantic parsers based on pre-trained language models (LMs). In this study, we empirically investigate improving an LM’s generalization in semantic parsing with two simple techniques: at the token level, we introduce a token preprocessing method to preserve the semantic boundaries of tokens produced by LM tokenizers; at the sequence level, we propose to use special tokens to mark the boundaries of components aligned between input and output. Our experimental results on two text-to-SQL semantic parsing datasets show that our token preprocessing, although simple, can substantially improve the LM performance on both types of generalization, and our component boundary marking method is particularly helpful for compositional generalization.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
150–160
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.15
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.15
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daking Rai, Bailin Wang, Yilun Zhou, and Ziyu Yao. 2023. Improving Generalization in Language Model-based Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing: Two Simple Semantic Boundary-based Techniques. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 150–160, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Generalization in Language Model-based Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing: Two Simple Semantic Boundary-based Techniques (Rai et al., ACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.15.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.15.mp4