SLOG: A Structural Generalization Benchmark for Semantic Parsing

Bingzhi Li, Lucia Donatelli, Alexander Koller, Tal Linzen, Yuekun Yao, Najoung Kim


Abstract
The goal of compositional generalization benchmarks is to evaluate how well models generalize to new complex linguistic expressions. Existing benchmarks often focus on lexical generalization, the interpretation of novel lexical items in syntactic structures familiar from training; structural generalization tasks, where a model needs to interpret syntactic structures that are themselves unfamiliar from training, are often underrepresented, resulting in overly optimistic perceptions of how well models can generalize. We introduce SLOG, a semantic parsing dataset that extends COGS (Kim and Linzen, 2020) with 17 structural generalization cases. In our experiments, the generalization accuracy of Transformer models, including pretrained ones, only reaches 40.6%, while a structure-aware parser only achieves 70.8%. These results are far from the near-perfect accuracy existing models achieve on COGS, demonstrating the role of SLOG in foregrounding the large discrepancy between models’ lexical and structural generalization capacities.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.194
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3213–3232
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.194
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.194
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bingzhi Li, Lucia Donatelli, Alexander Koller, Tal Linzen, Yuekun Yao, and Najoung Kim. 2023. SLOG: A Structural Generalization Benchmark for Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3213–3232, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SLOG: A Structural Generalization Benchmark for Semantic Parsing (Li et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.194.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.194.mp4