COGS: A Compositional Generalization Challenge Based on Semantic Interpretation

Najoung Kim, Tal Linzen


Abstract
Natural language is characterized by compositionality: the meaning of a complex expression is constructed from the meanings of its constituent parts. To facilitate the evaluation of the compositional abilities of language processing architectures, we introduce COGS, a semantic parsing dataset based on a fragment of English. The evaluation portion of COGS contains multiple systematic gaps that can only be addressed by compositional generalization; these include new combinations of familiar syntactic structures, or new combinations of familiar words and familiar structures. In experiments with Transformers and LSTMs, we found that in-distribution accuracy on the COGS test set was near-perfect (96–99%), but generalization accuracy was substantially lower (16–35%) and showed high sensitivity to random seed (+-6–8%). These findings indicate that contemporary standard NLP models are limited in their compositional generalization capacity, and position COGS as a good way to measure progress.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.731
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9087–9105
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.731
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.731
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Najoung Kim and Tal Linzen. 2020. COGS: A Compositional Generalization Challenge Based on Semantic Interpretation. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 9087–9105, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
COGS: A Compositional Generalization Challenge Based on Semantic Interpretation (Kim & Linzen, EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.731.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939064
Code
 najoungkim/COGS
Data
CFQSCAN