Disambiguate First, Parse Later: Generating Interpretations for Ambiguity Resolution in Semantic Parsing

Irina Saparina, Mirella Lapata


Abstract
Handling ambiguity and underspecification is an important challenge in natural language interfaces, particularly for tasks like text-to-SQL semantic parsing. We propose a modular approach that resolves ambiguity using natural language interpretations before mapping these to logical forms (e.g., SQL queries). Although LLMs excel at parsing unambiguous utterances, they show strong biases for ambiguous ones, typically predicting only preferred interpretations. We constructively exploit this bias to generate an initial set of preferred disambiguations and then apply a specialized infilling model to identify and generate missing interpretations. To train the infilling model, we introduce an annotation method that uses SQL execution to validate different meanings. Our approach improves interpretation coverage and generalizes across datasets with different annotation styles, database structures, and ambiguity types.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.863
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16825–16839
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.findings-acl.863/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.863
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irina Saparina and Mirella Lapata. 2025. Disambiguate First, Parse Later: Generating Interpretations for Ambiguity Resolution in Semantic Parsing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 16825–16839, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Disambiguate First, Parse Later: Generating Interpretations for Ambiguity Resolution in Semantic Parsing (Saparina & Lapata, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.findings-acl.863.pdf