# Compositional Generalization and Natural Language Variation: Can a Semantic Parsing Approach Handle Both?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12725 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12725/

## Key facts

- Cited by 147 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 147)

- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03111/) (2023)
- [PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05093/) (2021)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [Binding Language Models in Symbolic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02875/) (2022)
- [RESDSQL: Decoupling Schema Linking and Skeleton Parsing for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05965/) (2023)
- [CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16347/) (2024)
- [Compositional Exemplars for In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05698/) (2023)
- [Diverse Demonstrations Improve In-context Compositional Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06800/) (2022)
- [The Devil is in the Detail: Simple Tricks Improve Systematic Generalization of Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12284/) (2021)
- [Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08762/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Survey of Data Augmentation for Limited Data Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07499/) (2021)
- [Evaluating the Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00498/) (2022)
- [State-of-the-art generalisation research in NLP: A taxonomy and review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03050/) (2022)
- [Compositional Semantic Parsing with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15003/) (2022)
- [Graphix-T5: Mixing Pre-Trained Transformers with Graph-Aware Layers for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07507/) (2023)
- [Exploring Underexplored Limitations of Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05157/) (2021)
- [RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06983/) (2022)
- [Exploring Chain-of-Thought Style Prompting for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14215/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-based Code Generation for Low-Resource and Domain-Specific Programming Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03981/) (2024)
- [Meta-Learning to Compositionally Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04252/) (2021)
- [The Neural Data Router: Adaptive Control Flow in Transformers Improves Systematic Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07732/) (2021)
- [The paradox of the compositionality of natural language: a neural machine translation case study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05885/) (2021)
- [How to Prompt LLMs for Text-to-SQL: A Study in Zero-shot, Single-domain, and Cross-domain Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11853/) (2023)
- [Grammar Prompting for Domain-Specific Language Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19234/) (2023)
- [Unlocking Compositional Generalization in Pre-trained Models Using Intermediate Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07478/) (2021)
- [Synthesizing Text-to-SQL Data from Weak and Strong LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03256/) (2024)
- [Dr.Spider: A Diagnostic Evaluation Benchmark towards Text-to-SQL Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08881/) (2023)
- [Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06688/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Text-to-SQL Parsing: Concepts, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13629/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sequence-to-sequence models excel at handling natural language variation, but have been shown to struggle with out-of-distribution compositional generalization. This has motivated new specialized architectures with stronger compositional biases, but most of these approaches have only been evaluated on synthetically-generated datasets, which are not representative of natural language variation. In this work we ask: can we develop a semantic parsing approach that handles both natural language variation and compositional generalization? To better assess this capability, we propose new train and test splits of non-synthetic datasets. We demonstrate that strong existing approaches do not perform well across a broad set of evaluations. We also propose NQG-T5, a hybrid model that combines a high-precision grammar-based approach with a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model. It outperforms existing approaches across several compositional generalization challenges on non-synthetic data, while also being competitive with the state-of-the-art on standard evaluations. While still far from solving this problem, our study highlights the importance of diverse evaluations and the open challenge of handling both compositional generalization and natural language variation in semantic parsing.