Compositional Generalization in Multilingual Semantic Parsing over Wikidata
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Abstract (arXiv)
Semantic parsing (SP) allows humans to leverage vast knowledge resources through natural interaction. However, parsers are mostly designed for and evaluated on English resources, such as CFQ (Keysers et al., 2020), the current standard benchmark based on English data generated from grammar rules and oriented towards Freebase, an outdated knowledge base. We propose a method for creating a multilingual, parallel dataset of question-query pairs, grounded in Wikidata. We introduce such a dataset, which we call Multilingual Compositional Wikidata Questions (MCWQ), and use it to analyze the compositional generalization of semantic parsers in Hebrew, Kannada, Chinese and English. While within-language generalization is comparable across languages, experiments on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer demonstrate that cross-lingual compositional generalization fails, even with state-of-the-art pretrained multilingual encoders. Furthermore, our methodology, dataset and results will facilitate future research on SP in more realistic and diverse settings than has been possible with existing resources.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 48 of its 90 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2021.
Builds on
48 of 90 references.
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36 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 4; 2024: 0; 2025: 2; 2026: 2.
9 papers.
- 2022XRICL: Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Cross-lingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsingcited by 33
- 2023Pay More Attention to Relation Exploration for Knowledge Base Question Answeringcited by 7
- 2023On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasetscited by 6
- 2025SPARQL Query Generation with LLMs: Measuring the Impact of Training Data Memorization and Knowledge Injectioncited by 6
- 2023XSemPLR: Cross-Lingual Semantic Parsing in Multiple Natural Languages and Meaning Representationscited by 5
- 2025Text2Cypher Across Languages: Evaluating and Finetuning LLMscited by 3
- 2023GraphextQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Graph-Enhanced Large Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Incremental Multilingual Text2Cypher with Adapter Combinationcited by 0
- 2026Known Intents, New Combinations: Clause-Factorized Decoding for Compositional Multi-Intent Detectioncited by 0
- 2026Known Intents, New Combinations: Clause-Factorized Decoding for Compositional Multi-Intent Detection30 Mar 2026
- 2026Incremental Multilingual Text2Cypher with Adapter Combination22 Jan 2026
- 2025SPARQL Query Generation with LLMs: Measuring the Impact of Training Data Memorization and Knowledge Injection18 Jul 2025
- 2025Text2Cypher Across Languages: Evaluating and Finetuning LLMs26 Jun 2025
- 2023GraphextQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Graph-Enhanced Large Language Models12 Oct 2023
- 2023On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasets20 Jun 2023
- 2023XSemPLR: Cross-Lingual Semantic Parsing in Multiple Natural Languages and Meaning Representations7 Jun 2023
- 2023Pay More Attention to Relation Exploration for Knowledge Base Question Answering3 May 2023
- 2022XRICL: Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Cross-lingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing25 Oct 2022