Machine translation is going through a radical revolution, driven by the explosive development of deep learning techniques using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). In this paper, we consider a special case in machine translation problems, targeting to translate natural language into Structural Query Language (SQL) for data retrieval over relational database. Although generic CNN and RNN learn the grammar structure of SQL when trained with sufficient samples, the accuracy and training efficiency of the model could be dramatically improved, when the translation model is deeply integrated with the grammar rules of SQL. We present a new encoder-decoder framework, with a suite of new approaches, including new semantic features fed into the encoder as well as new grammar-aware states injected into the memory of decoder. These techniques help the neural network focus on understanding semantics of the operations in natural language and save the efforts on SQL grammar learning. The empirical evaluation on real world database and queries show that our approach outperform state-of-the-art solution by a significant margin.
In last two years, researchers are turning to adopt recurrent neural network for automatic data querying and programming based on natural language inputs, which aims to translate original natural language into programs and data querying results. Semantic parsing, for example, is the problem of converting natural language into formal and executable logics. In last two years, sequence-to-sequence model is becoming state-of-the-art solution of semantic parsing @cite_26 @cite_20 @cite_16 . While most of the existing studies exploit the availability of human intelligence for additional labels @cite_8 @cite_7 , our approach learns the translation with input-output sample pairs only. While masking is proposed in the literature for symbolic parsing by storing key-variable pairs in the memory @cite_10 , the masking technique proposed in this paper supports more complex operations, covering both short-term and long-term dependencies. Moreover, we hereby emphasize that the grammar structure of SQL is known to be much more complicated than the logical forms used in semantic parsing.
@cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_20
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Recently, strong results have been demonstrated by Deep Recurrent Neural Networks on natural language transduction problems. In this paper we explore the representational power of these models using synthetic grammars designed to exhibit phenomena similar to those found in real transduction problems such as machine translation. These experiments lead us to propose new memory-based recurrent networks that implement continuously differentiable analogues of traditional data structures such as Stacks, Queues, and DeQues. We show that these architectures exhibit superior generalisation performance to Deep RNNs and are often able to learn the underlying generating algorithms in our transduction experiments. Modeling crisp logical regularities is crucial in semantic parsing, making it difficult for neural models with no task-specific prior knowledge to achieve good results. In this paper, we introduce data recombination, a novel framework for injecting such prior knowledge into a model. From the training data, we induce a high-precision synchronous context-free grammar, which captures important conditional independence properties commonly found in semantic parsing. We then train a sequence-to-sequence recurrent network (RNN) model with a novel attention-based copying mechanism on datapoints sampled from this grammar, thereby teaching the model about these structural properties. Data recombination improves the accuracy of our RNN model on three semantic parsing datasets, leading to new state-of-the-art performance on the standard GeoQuery dataset for models with comparable supervision. We propose an approach for semantic parsing that uses a recurrent neural network to map a natural language question into a logical form representation of a KB query. Building on recent work by (, 2015), the interpretable logical forms, which are structured objects obeying certain constraints, are enumerated by an underlying grammar and are paired with their canonical realizations. In order to use sequence prediction, we need to sequentialize these logical forms. We compare three sequentializations: a direct linearization of the logical form, a linearization of the associated canonical realization, and a sequence consisting of derivation steps relative to the underlying grammar. We also show how grammatical constraints on the derivation sequence can easily be integrated inside the RNN-based sequential predictor. Our experiments show important improvements over previous results for the same dataset, and also demonstrate the advantage of incorporating the grammatical constraints. We present an approach to rapidly and easily build natural language interfaces to databases for new domains, whose performance improves over time based on user feedback, and requires minimal intervention. To achieve this, we adapt neural sequence models to map utterances directly to SQL with its full expressivity, bypassing any intermediate meaning representations. These models are immediately deployed online to solicit feedback from real users to flag incorrect queries. Finally, the popularity of SQL facilitates gathering annotations for incorrect predictions using the crowd, which is directly used to improve our models. This complete feedback loop, without intermediate representations or database specific engineering, opens up new ways of building high quality semantic parsers. Experiments suggest that this approach can be deployed quickly for any new target domain, as we show by learning a semantic parser for an online academic database from scratch.