Cross-domain Semantic Parsing via Paraphrasing

Yu Su, Xifeng Yan


Abstract
Existing studies on semantic parsing mainly focus on the in-domain setting. We formulate cross-domain semantic parsing as a domain adaptation problem: train a semantic parser on some source domains and then adapt it to the target domain. Due to the diversity of logical forms in different domains, this problem presents unique and intriguing challenges. By converting logical forms into canonical utterances in natural language, we reduce semantic parsing to paraphrasing, and develop an attentive sequence-to-sequence paraphrase model that is general and flexible to adapt to different domains. We discover two problems, small micro variance and large macro variance, of pre-trained word embeddings that hinder their direct use in neural networks, and propose standardization techniques as a remedy. On the popular Overnight dataset, which contains eight domains, we show that both cross-domain training and standardized pre-trained word embeddings can bring significant improvement.
Anthology ID:
D17-1127
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1235–1246
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1127
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1127
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu Su and Xifeng Yan. 2017. Cross-domain Semantic Parsing via Paraphrasing. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1235–1246, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-domain Semantic Parsing via Paraphrasing (Su & Yan, EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1127.pdf
Code
 ysu1989/CrossSemparse