Neural Symbolic Machines: Learning Semantic Parsers on Freebase with Weak Supervision
Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2017 papers
Abstract
Harnessing the statistical power of neural networks to perform language understanding and symbolic reasoning is difficult, when it requires executing efficient discrete operations against a large knowledge-base. In this work, we introduce a Neural Symbolic Machine (NSM), which contains (a) a neural "programmer", i.e., a sequence-to-sequence model that maps language utterances to programs and utilizes a key-variable memory to handle compositionality (b) a symbolic "computer", i.e., a Lisp interpreter that performs program execution, and helps find good programs by pruning the search space. We apply REINFORCE to directly optimize the task reward of this structured prediction problem. To train with weak supervision and improve the stability of REINFORCE we augment it with an iterative maximum-likelihood training process. NSM outperforms the state-of-theart on the WEBQUESTIONSSP dataset when trained from question-answer pairs only, without requiring any feature engineering or domain-specific knowledge.
Related Papers
- Lisp activities in Japan(1979)
- → Understanding Lisp Programs is Improving Lisp Programs(1976)
- Starting LISP for AI(1987)
- Notes on the Conversion of LogLisp from Rutgers/UCI-Lisp to InterLisp,(1983)
- The Framework and the Education for the Programmer(2005)