Neural Symbolic Machines
Semantic Parsing on Freebase with Weak Supervision
Chen Liang, Jonathan Berant, Quoc Le, Kenneth Forbus, Ni Lao
Overview
● Motivation: Semantic Parsing and Program Induction
● Neural Symbolic Machines
○ Key-Variable Memory
○ Code Assistance
○ Augmented REINFORCE
● Experiments and analysis
Semantic Parsing: Language to Programs
Natural Language
Question/Instruction
LATEN T
Program /
Logical Form
Full supervision
(hard to collect)
Answer
Goal
[Berant, et al 2013; Liang 2013]
Weak supervision
(easy to collect)
Question Answering with Knowledge Base
Largest city in US?
GO
(Hop V1 CityIn)
(Argmax V2 Population)
RETURN
NYC
Freebase, DBpedia, YAGO, NELL
1. Compositionality
2. Large Search Space
Freebase:
23K predicates, 82M
entities, 417M triplets
WebQuestionsSP Dataset
● 5,810 questions Google Suggest API & Amazon MTurk1
● Remove invalid QA pairs2
● 3,098 training examples, 1,639 testing examples remaining
● Open-domain, and contains grammatical error
● Multiple entities as answer => macro-averaged F1
Grammatical error
Multiple entities
• What do Michelle Obama do for a living? writer, lawyer
• What character did Natalie Portman play in Star Wars? Padme Amidala
• What currency do you use in Costa Rica? Costa Rican colon
• What did Obama study in school? political science
• What killed Sammy Davis Jr? throat cancer
[Berant et al, 2013; Yih et al, 2016]
(Scalable) Neural Program Induction
● Impressive works to show NN can
● The learned operations are not as
learn addition and sorting, but...
scalable and precise.
[Reed & Freitas 2015]
● Why not use existing modules that
are scalable, precise and
interpretable?
[Zaremba & Sutskever 2016]
Overview
● Motivation: Semantic Parsing and Program Induction
● Neural Symbolic Machines
○ Key-Variable Memory
○ Code Assistance
○ Augmented REINFORCE
● Experiments and analysis
Neural Symbolic Machines
Weak
supervision
Manager
Neural
Programmer
Question
Answer
Program
Output
Symbolic
Computer
Knowledge Base
Predefined
Functions
Abstract
Scalable
Precise
Non-differentiable