Value-based Search in Execution Space for Mapping Instructions to Programs

Dor Muhlgay, Jonathan Herzig, Jonathan Berant


Abstract
Training models to map natural language instructions to programs, given target world supervision only, requires searching for good programs at training time. Search is commonly done using beam search in the space of partial programs or program trees, but as the length of the instructions grows finding a good program becomes difficult. In this work, we propose a search algorithm that uses the target world state, known at training time, to train a critic network that predicts the expected reward of every search state. We then score search states on the beam by interpolating their expected reward with the likelihood of programs represented by the search state. Moreover, we search not in the space of programs but in a more compressed state of program executions, augmented with recent entities and actions. On the SCONE dataset, we show that our algorithm dramatically improves performance on all three domains compared to standard beam search and other baselines.
Anthology ID:
N19-1193
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1942–1954
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1193
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1193
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dor Muhlgay, Jonathan Herzig, and Jonathan Berant. 2019. Value-based Search in Execution Space for Mapping Instructions to Programs. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1942–1954, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Value-based Search in Execution Space for Mapping Instructions to Programs (Muhlgay et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1193.pdf
Code
 tau-nlp/vbsix-lang2program