Unified Semantic Parsing with Weak Supervision

Priyanka Agrawal, Ayushi Dalmia, Parag Jain, Abhishek Bansal, Ashish Mittal, Karthik Sankaranarayanan


Abstract
Semantic parsing over multiple knowledge bases enables a parser to exploit structural similarities of programs across the multiple domains. However, the fundamental challenge lies in obtaining high-quality annotations of (utterance, program) pairs across various domains needed for training such models. To overcome this, we propose a novel framework to build a unified multi-domain enabled semantic parser trained only with weak supervision (denotations). Weakly supervised training is particularly arduous as the program search space grows exponentially in a multi-domain setting. To solve this, we incorporate a multi-policy distillation mechanism in which we first train domain-specific semantic parsers (teachers) using weak supervision in the absence of the ground truth programs, followed by training a single unified parser (student) from the domain specific policies obtained from these teachers. The resultant semantic parser is not only compact but also generalizes better, and generates more accurate programs. It further does not require the user to provide a domain label while querying. On the standard Overnight dataset (containing multiple domains), we demonstrate that the proposed model improves performance by 20% in terms of denotation accuracy in comparison to baseline techniques.
Anthology ID:
P19-1473
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4801–4810
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1473
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1473
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Priyanka Agrawal, Ayushi Dalmia, Parag Jain, Abhishek Bansal, Ashish Mittal, and Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2019. Unified Semantic Parsing with Weak Supervision. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4801–4810, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unified Semantic Parsing with Weak Supervision (Agrawal et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1473.pdf
Code
 pagrawal-ml/Unified-Semantic-Parsing