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programmers of semantic parsers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Type diversity helps transformers understand language structure better

Type Diversity Enables Transformers to Generalise Compositionally

Abstract: Compositional generalisation has been divided into lexical and structural generalisation. Previous work has found that structural generalisation is harder than lexical for Transformers. We propose that this difference is not inherent to Transformers, but due to the high diversity of lexical types and low diversity of structural types in the specific datasets of these previous works. By type diversity we mean the number of different constructors of that type, instead of, for example, the specific word combinations that might populate the structure. To test this, we vary the amounts of type diversity of lexical and structural types in previously published datasets. We create linguistically diverse variants of the COGS and SLOG datasets using Grammatical Framework. We find that type diversity correlates with compositional generalisation equally in lexical and structural test cases, supporting our hypothesis. We note a contradiction with the proposition in previous work that compound divergence explains the difficulty in compositional generalisation tasks. We further investigate the effects of other dataset properties on compositional generalisation, such as the diversity of types other than the novel test structure, and surface properties of the logical semantics format.

Fri 11 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Transformers, a type of artificial intelligence, often struggle to understand new ways that words and sentence structures are combined. The authors found that this difficulty isn’t because of a built-in limitation, but rather because previous tests used datasets with less variety in sentence structures compared to word types. By creating new datasets with more balanced variety in both words and structures, they showed that transformers can actually learn new patterns equally well. They also questioned earlier ideas about what makes these tasks hard and looked into other factors that might affect learning.
Open 2609.13144v1