Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables

Understand

Two important aspects of semantic parsing for question answering are the breadth of the knowledge source and the depth of logical compositionality.

• While existing work trades off one aspect for another, this paper simultaneously makes progress on both fronts through a new task: answering complex questions on semi-structured tables using question-answer pairs as supervision.
• The central challenge arises from two compounding factors: the broader domain results in an open-ended set of relations, and the deeper compositionality results in a combinatorial explosion in the space of logical forms.
• We propose a logical-form driven parsing algorithm guided by strong typing constraints and show that it obtains significant improvements over natural baselines.