Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing with Execution-based Spurious Program Filtering

Kang-il Lee, Segwang Kim, Kyomin Jung


Abstract
The problem of spurious programs is a longstanding challenge when training a semantic parser from weak supervision. To eliminate such programs that have wrong semantics but correct denotation, existing methods focus on exploiting similarities between examples based on domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose a domain-agnostic filtering mechanism based on program execution results. Specifically, for each program obtained through the search process, we first construct a representation that captures the program’s semantics as execution results under various inputs. Then, we run a majority vote on these representations to identify and filter out programs with significantly different semantics from the other programs. In particular, our method is orthogonal to the program search process so that it can easily augment any of the existing weakly supervised semantic parsing frameworks. Empirical evaluations on the Natural Language Visual Reasoning and WikiTableQuestions demonstrate that applying our method to the existing semantic parsers induces significantly improved performances.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.425
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:
6884–6894
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.425
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.425
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kang-il Lee, Segwang Kim, and Kyomin Jung. 2023. Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing with Execution-based Spurious Program Filtering. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6884–6894, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing with Execution-based Spurious Program Filtering (Lee et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.425.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.425.mp4