Confidence Driven Unsupervised Semantic Parsing

Dan Goldwasser1,  Roi Reichart2,  James Clarke1,  Dan Roth1
1University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2Massachusetts Institute of Technology


Abstract

Current approaches for semantic parsing take a supervised approach requiring a considerable amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. This supervision bottleneck is one of the major difficulties in scaling up semantic parsing. We argue that a semantic parser can be trained effectively without annotated data, and introduce an unsupervised learning algorithm. The algorithm takes a self training approach driven by confidence estimation. Evaluated over Geoquery, a standard dataset for this task, our system achieved 66% accuracy, compared to 80% of its fully supervised counter- part, demonstrating the promise of unsupervised approaches for this task.




Full paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-1149.pdf