A Survey on Semantic Parsing from the perspective of Compositionality

Abstract: Different from previous surveys in semantic parsing (Kamath and Das, 2018) and knowledge base question answering(KBQA)(Chakraborty et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2019; Hoffner et al., 2017) we try to takes a different perspective on the study of semantic parsing. Specifically, we will focus on (a)meaning composition from syntactical structure(Partee, 1975), and (b) the ability of semantic parsers to handle lexical variation given the context of a knowledge base (KB). In the following section after an introduction of the field of semantic parsing and its uses in KBQA, we will describe meaning representation using grammar formalism CCG (Steedman, 1996). We will discuss semantic composition using formal languages in Section 2. In section 3 we will consider systems that uses formal languages e.g. $\lambda$-calculus (Steedman, 1996), $\lambda$-DCS (Liang, 2013). Section 4 and 5 consider semantic parser using structured-language for logical form. Section 6 is on different benchmark datasets ComplexQuestions (Bao et al.,2016) and GraphQuestions (Su et al., 2016) that can be used to evaluate semantic parser on their ability to answer complex questions that are highly compositional in nature.