ReCOGS: How Incidental Details of a Logical Form Overshadow an Evaluation of Semantic Interpretation

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Hauptverfasser: Wu, Zhengxuan, Manning, Christopher D., Potts, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Wu, Zhengxuan
Manning, Christopher D.
Potts, Christopher
author_facet Wu, Zhengxuan
Manning, Christopher D.
Potts, Christopher
contents Compositional generalization benchmarks for semantic parsing seek to assess whether models can accurately compute meanings for novel sentences, but operationalize this in terms of logical form (LF) prediction. This raises the concern that semantically irrelevant details of the chosen LFs could shape model performance. We argue that this concern is realized for the COGS benchmark. COGS poses generalization splits that appear impossible for present-day models, which could be taken as an indictment of those models. However, we show that the negative results trace to incidental features of COGS LFs. Converting these LFs to semantically equivalent ones and factoring out capabilities unrelated to semantic interpretation, we find that even baseline models get traction. A recent variable-free translation of COGS LFs suggests similar conclusions, but we observe this format is not semantically equivalent; it is incapable of accurately representing some COGS meanings. These findings inform our proposal for ReCOGS, a modified version of COGS that comes closer to assessing the target semantic capabilities while remaining very challenging. Overall, our results reaffirm the importance of compositional generalization and careful benchmark task design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_13716
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ReCOGS: How Incidental Details of a Logical Form Overshadow an Evaluation of Semantic Interpretation
Wu, Zhengxuan
Manning, Christopher D.
Potts, Christopher
Computation and Language
Compositional generalization benchmarks for semantic parsing seek to assess whether models can accurately compute meanings for novel sentences, but operationalize this in terms of logical form (LF) prediction. This raises the concern that semantically irrelevant details of the chosen LFs could shape model performance. We argue that this concern is realized for the COGS benchmark. COGS poses generalization splits that appear impossible for present-day models, which could be taken as an indictment of those models. However, we show that the negative results trace to incidental features of COGS LFs. Converting these LFs to semantically equivalent ones and factoring out capabilities unrelated to semantic interpretation, we find that even baseline models get traction. A recent variable-free translation of COGS LFs suggests similar conclusions, but we observe this format is not semantically equivalent; it is incapable of accurately representing some COGS meanings. These findings inform our proposal for ReCOGS, a modified version of COGS that comes closer to assessing the target semantic capabilities while remaining very challenging. Overall, our results reaffirm the importance of compositional generalization and careful benchmark task design.
title ReCOGS: How Incidental Details of a Logical Form Overshadow an Evaluation of Semantic Interpretation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13716