Sentence Rewriting for Semantic Parsing

A major challenge of semantic parsing is the vocabulary mismatch problem between natural language and target ontology. In this paper, we propose a sentence rewriting based semantic parsing method, which can effectively resolve the mismatch problem by rewriting a sentence into a new form which has the same structure with its target logical form. Specifically, we propose two sentence-rewriting methods for two common types of mismatch: a dictionary-based method for 1N mismatch and a template-based method for N-1 mismatch. We evaluate our sentence rewriting based semantic parser on the benchmark semantic parsing dataset – WEBQUESTIONS. Experimental results show that our system outperforms the base system with a 3.4% gain in F1, and generates logical forms more accurately and parses sentences more robustly.