# Compositional Generalization in Multilingual Semantic Parsing over Wikidata

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03509 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03509/

## 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 (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02320/) (2020)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [Measuring Compositional Generalization: A Comprehensive Method on Realistic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09713/) (2019)
- [COGS: A Compositional Generalization Challenge Based on Semantic Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05465/) (2020)
- [XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01401/) (2020)
- [Are All Languages Created Equal in Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09093/) (2020)
- [The Evolved Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11117/) (2019)
- [Beyond I.I.D.: Three Levels of Generalization for Question Answering on Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07743/) (2020)
- [XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07412/) (2021)
- [Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12688/) (2019)
- [Large-scale Simple Question Answering with Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02075/) (2015)
- [A Benchmark for Systematic Generalization in Grounded Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05161/) (2020)
- [Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08762/) (2021)
- [Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04721/) (2020)
- [Tensor2Tensor for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07416/) (2018)
- [KQA Pro: A Dataset with Explicit Compositional Programs for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03875/) (2020)
- [Span-based Semantic Parsing for Compositional Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06040/) (2020)
- [Complex Sequential Question Answering: Towards Learning to Converse Over Linked Question Answer Pairs with a Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10314/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [XRICL: Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Cross-lingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13693/) (2022)
- [Pay More Attention to Relation Exploration for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02118/) (2023)
- [On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11420/) (2023)
- [SPARQL Query Generation with LLMs: Measuring the Impact of Training Data Memorization and Knowledge Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13859/) (2025)
- [XSemPLR: Cross-Lingual Semantic Parsing in Multiple Natural Languages and Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04085/) (2023)
- [Text2Cypher Across Languages: Evaluating and Finetuning LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21445/) (2025)
- [GraphextQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Graph-Enhanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08487/) (2023)
- [Incremental Multilingual Text2Cypher with Adapter Combination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16097/) (2026)
- [Known Intents, New Combinations: Clause-Factorized Decoding for Compositional Multi-Intent Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28929/) (2026)

## 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.