# Lambda Dependency-Based Compositional Semantics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4408 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.4408/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [RnG-KBQA: Generation Augmented Iterative Ranking for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08678/) (2021)
- [What Are Tools Anyway? A Survey from the Language Model Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15452/) (2024)
- [Improving Compositional Generalization with Latent Structure and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07610/) (2021)
- [Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05743/) (2021)
- [XRICL: Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Cross-lingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13693/) (2022)
- [Uni-Parser: Unified Semantic Parser for Question Answering on Knowledge Base and Database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05165/) (2022)
- [GraphQ IR: Unifying the Semantic Parsing of Graph Query Languages with One Intermediate Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12078/) (2022)
- [Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15056/) (2023)
- [Grounded Graph Decoding Improves Compositional Generalization in Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03642/) (2021)
- [QAGCN: Answering Multi-Relation Questions via Single-Step Implicit Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01818/) (2022)
- [Learning Language Representations with Logical Inductive Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09458/) (2023)
- [How Proficient Are Large Language Models in Formal Languages? An In-Depth Insight for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05777/) (2024)
- [PeCoQ: A Dataset for Persian Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14167/) (2021)
- [One Semantic Parser to Parse Them All: Sequence to Sequence Multi-Task Learning on Semantic Parsing Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04476/) (2021)
- [Join-Chain Network: A Logical Reasoning View of the Multi-head Attention in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02729/) (2022)
- [Question-Aware Memory Network for Multi-hop Question Answering in Human-Robot Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13173/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Graph Question Answering via SPARQL Silhouette Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09475/) (2021)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Functional Compositionality of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03103/) (2023)
- [Semantic Parsing with Candidate Expressions for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00414/) (2024)
- [A Knowledge-based Approach for Answering Complex Questions in Persian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02040/) (2021)
- [Better Query Graph Selection for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12662/) (2022)
- [A Method of Query Graph Reranking for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12808/) (2022)
- [Semantic Parsing in Limited Resource Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07429/) (2023)
- [GEMMA-SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Model Based on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04710/) (2025)
- [Which bird does not have wings: Negative-constrained KGQA with Schema-guided Semantic Matching and Self-directed Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14749/) (2026)
- [Anatomy of a Query: W5H Dimensions and FAR Patterns for Text-to-SQL Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05525/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This short note presents a new formal language, lambda dependency-based compositional semantics (lambda DCS) for representing logical forms in semantic parsing. By eliminating variables and making existential quantification implicit, lambda DCS logical forms are generally more compact than those in lambda calculus.