Data Synthesis and Iterative Refinement for Neural Semantic Parsing without Annotated Logical Forms.

Semantic parsing aims to convert natural language utterances to logical forms. A critical challenge for constructing semantic parsers is the lack of labeled data. In this paper, we propose a data synthesis and iterative refinement framework for neural semantic parsing, which can build semantic parsers without annotated logical forms. We first generate a naive corpus by sampling logic forms from knowledge bases and synthesizing their canonical utterances. Then, we further propose a bootstrapping algorithm to iteratively refine data and model, via a denoising language model and knowledge-constrained decoding. Experimental results show that our approach achieves competitive performance on Geo, ATIS and Overnight datasets in both unsupervised and semi-supervised data settings.