Improving Semantic Parsing and Generation Evaluation with Challenging Benchmarks

Core Concepts

Neural models for semantic parsing and text generation with Discourse Representation Structures (DRS) exhibit strong performance on standard test sets, but struggle with more challenging benchmarks that require handling longer texts and compositional generalization.

Abstract

The authors argue that the current performance of neural semantic parsers and text generators on the Parallel Meaning Bank (PMB) dataset is inflated due to data leakage and non-representative test sets. To address this, they introduce several changes: A systematic data split approach to create a more reliable standard test set, reducing overlap between training and test data. A long-text challenge set with manually annotated longer documents to assess the models' performance on complex, multi-sentence texts. A compositional challenge set created by recombining Combinatory Categorical Grammar (CCG) derivation trees, to evaluate the models' ability to handle compositional generalization. Experiments with five neural models (LSTM, mT5, byT5, mBART, DRS-MLM) show that their performance declines significantly on the challenge sets, revealing the limitations of these models when confronted with longer texts and compositional structures. The authors conclude that semantic parsing and text-to-meaning generation are far from being solved tasks.

Stats

The average sentence length in the standard test set is around 5-6 words, while the long-text challenge set has an average of 61 words. The systematic data split reduces the word overlap rate between training and test sets compared to the random split.

Quotes

"The rapid development of neural models and their incredible performance seem to make the impression that tasks like semantic parsing are practically solved." "We carried out a critical examination of the PMB and revealed three (related) problems: (1) there is a "data leakage" from the training data to the development and test splits; (2) the random splits of the data lead to a non-optimal division; and (3) the test set is often regarded as "easy" as it contains a large amount of relatively short sentences."

Key Insights Distilled From

Gaining More Insight into Neural Semantic Parsing with Challenging Benchmarks

by Xiao Zhang,C... at arxiv.org 04-15-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.08354.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the proposed challenge sets be extended to other semantic parsing and text generation tasks beyond the PMB?

The challenge sets introduced in the study, focusing on longer texts and compositional recombination, can be extended to other semantic parsing and text generation tasks by following a similar methodology. For longer texts, datasets from various domains can be selected, and manual corrections can be made to ensure accurate annotations. This can help evaluate the model's performance on more complex and realistic data. For compositional recombination, the use of grammatical formalisms like CCG can be applied to create new test sets by manipulating the syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. By incorporating these challenges into different datasets, researchers can assess the generalization capabilities of neural models across various linguistic phenomena and domains.

How can the insights from this study inform the design of future semantic processing datasets and benchmarks?

The insights from this study can inform the design of future semantic processing datasets and benchmarks in several ways: Improved Data Splitting: Future datasets can adopt a systematic splitting approach to ensure a more reliable evaluation of models. By reducing data leakage and ensuring a more representative distribution of data, the performance of models can be accurately assessed. Inclusion of Challenge Sets: Future benchmarks can include challenge sets that test the models on longer texts and compositional structures. This can provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the models' capabilities and highlight areas where they may struggle. Diverse Linguistic Phenomena: Future datasets can incorporate a wide range of linguistic phenomena, such as anaphors, temporal expressions, and discourse relations, to test the models' ability to handle diverse semantic tasks. Evaluation Metrics: Introducing new evaluation metrics that capture the nuances of semantic parsing and text generation tasks can provide a more nuanced understanding of model performance and capabilities.

What architectural changes or training techniques could help neural models better handle longer texts and compositional structures?

To help neural models better handle longer texts and compositional structures, several architectural changes and training techniques can be considered: Hierarchical Architectures: Implementing hierarchical architectures can help the model process longer texts by capturing dependencies at different levels of granularity. Memory Mechanisms: Incorporating memory mechanisms like attention or memory networks can help the model retain information over longer sequences and complex structures. Curriculum Learning: Training the model on progressively more challenging examples can help it learn to handle compositional structures and longer texts gradually. Ensemble Methods: Combining multiple models trained on different aspects of the data can improve the model's ability to handle diverse linguistic phenomena. Fine-tuning on Challenging Data: Fine-tuning the model on the challenge sets introduced in the study can help it adapt to longer texts and compositional structures, improving its performance on such tasks.