# Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.00305 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00305/

## Key facts

- Cited by 515 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 515)

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- [MultiModalQA: Complex Question Answering over Text, Tables and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06039/) (2021)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

Two important aspects of semantic parsing for question answering are the breadth of the knowledge source and the depth of logical compositionality. While existing work trades off one aspect for another, this paper simultaneously makes progress on both fronts through a new task: answering complex questions on semi-structured tables using question-answer pairs as supervision. The central challenge arises from two compounding factors: the broader domain results in an open-ended set of relations, and the deeper compositionality results in a combinatorial explosion in the space of logical forms. We propose a logical-form driven parsing algorithm guided by strong typing constraints and show that it obtains significant improvements over natural baselines. For evaluation, we created a new dataset of 22,033 complex questions on Wikipedia tables, which is made publicly available.