Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision

Chen Liang, Jonathan Berant, Quoc Le, Kenneth D. Forbus, Ni Lao


Abstract
Harnessing the statistical power of neural networks to perform language understanding and symbolic reasoning is difficult, when it requires executing efficient discrete operations against a large knowledge-base. In this work, we introduce a Neural Symbolic Machine, which contains (a) a neural “programmer”, i.e., a sequence-to-sequence model that maps language utterances to programs and utilizes a key-variable memory to handle compositionality (b) a symbolic “computer”, i.e., a Lisp interpreter that performs program execution, and helps find good programs by pruning the search space. We apply REINFORCE to directly optimize the task reward of this structured prediction problem. To train with weak supervision and improve the stability of REINFORCE, we augment it with an iterative maximum-likelihood training process. NSM outperforms the state-of-the-art on the WebQuestionsSP dataset when trained from question-answer pairs only, without requiring any feature engineering or domain-specific knowledge.
Anthology ID:
P17-1003
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
23–33
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1003
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1003
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chen Liang, Jonathan Berant, Quoc Le, Kenneth D. Forbus, and Ni Lao. 2017. Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 23–33, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision (Liang et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp22-frontmatter/P17-1003.pdf
Note:
 P17-1003.Notes.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/234953110
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