@inproceedings{liang-etal-2017-neural,
title = "Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on {F}reebase with Weak Supervision",
author = "Liang, Chen and
Berant, Jonathan and
Le, Quoc and
Forbus, Kenneth D. and
Lao, Ni",
editor = "Barzilay, Regina and
Kan, Min-Yen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2017",
address = "Vancouver, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/P17-1003",
doi = "10.18653/v1/P17-1003",
pages = "23--33",
abstract = "Harnessing the statistical power of neural networks to perform language understanding and symbolic reasoning is difficult, when it requires executing efficient discrete operations against a large knowledge-base. In this work, we introduce a Neural Symbolic Machine, which contains (a) a neural {``}programmer{''}, i.e., a sequence-to-sequence model that maps language utterances to programs and utilizes a key-variable memory to handle compositionality (b) a symbolic {``}computer{''}, i.e., a Lisp interpreter that performs program execution, and helps find good programs by pruning the search space. We apply REINFORCE to directly optimize the task reward of this structured prediction problem. To train with weak supervision and improve the stability of REINFORCE, we augment it with an iterative maximum-likelihood training process. NSM outperforms the state-of-the-art on the WebQuestionsSP dataset when trained from question-answer pairs only, without requiring any feature engineering or domain-specific knowledge.",
}
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<abstract>Harnessing the statistical power of neural networks to perform language understanding and symbolic reasoning is difficult, when it requires executing efficient discrete operations against a large knowledge-base. In this work, we introduce a Neural Symbolic Machine, which contains (a) a neural “programmer”, i.e., a sequence-to-sequence model that maps language utterances to programs and utilizes a key-variable memory to handle compositionality (b) a symbolic “computer”, i.e., a Lisp interpreter that performs program execution, and helps find good programs by pruning the search space. We apply REINFORCE to directly optimize the task reward of this structured prediction problem. To train with weak supervision and improve the stability of REINFORCE, we augment it with an iterative maximum-likelihood training process. NSM outperforms the state-of-the-art on the WebQuestionsSP dataset when trained from question-answer pairs only, without requiring any feature engineering or domain-specific knowledge.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision
%A Liang, Chen
%A Berant, Jonathan
%A Le, Quoc
%A Forbus, Kenneth D.
%A Lao, Ni
%Y Barzilay, Regina
%Y Kan, Min-Yen
%S Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2017
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vancouver, Canada
%F liang-etal-2017-neural
%X Harnessing the statistical power of neural networks to perform language understanding and symbolic reasoning is difficult, when it requires executing efficient discrete operations against a large knowledge-base. In this work, we introduce a Neural Symbolic Machine, which contains (a) a neural “programmer”, i.e., a sequence-to-sequence model that maps language utterances to programs and utilizes a key-variable memory to handle compositionality (b) a symbolic “computer”, i.e., a Lisp interpreter that performs program execution, and helps find good programs by pruning the search space. We apply REINFORCE to directly optimize the task reward of this structured prediction problem. To train with weak supervision and improve the stability of REINFORCE, we augment it with an iterative maximum-likelihood training process. NSM outperforms the state-of-the-art on the WebQuestionsSP dataset when trained from question-answer pairs only, without requiring any feature engineering or domain-specific knowledge.
%R 10.18653/v1/P17-1003
%U https://aclanthology.org/P17-1003
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17-1003
%P 23-33
Markdown (Informal)
[Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision](https://aclanthology.org/P17-1003) (Liang et al., ACL 2017)
ACL