Papers › Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing

Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing

15 Apr 2021ACL 2022 5arXiv:2104.07554archive 2025-07-28

Tom Sherborne, Mirella Lapata

Recent work in cross-lingual semantic parsing has successfully applied machine translation to localize parsers to new languages. However, these advances assume access to high-quality machine translation systems and word alignment tools. We remove these assumptions and study cross-lingual semantic parsing as a zero-shot problem, without parallel data (i.e., utterance-logical form pairs) for new languages. We propose a multi-task encoder-decoder model to transfer parsing knowledge to additional languages using only English-logical form paired data and in-domain natural language corpora in each new language. Our model encourages language-agnostic encodings by jointly optimizing for logical-form generation with auxiliary objectives designed for cross-lingual latent representation alignment. Our parser performs significantly above translation-based baselines and, in some cases, competes with the supervised upper-bound.

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Cross-Lingual TransferDecoderFormMachine TranslationSemantic ParsingTranslationWord Alignment

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