Building a Semantic Parser Overnight

How do we build a semantic parser in a new domain starting with zero training ex-amples? We introduce a new methodol-ogy for this setting: First, we use a simple grammar to generate logical forms paired with canonical utterances. The logical forms are meant to cover the desired set of compositional operators, and the canon-ical utterances are meant to capture the meaning of the logical forms (although clumsily). We then use crowdsourcing to paraphrase these canonical utterances into natural utterances. The resulting data is used to train the semantic parser. We fur-ther study the role of compositionality in the resulting paraphrases. Finally, we test our methodology on seven domains and show that we can build an adequate se-mantic parser in just a few hours. 1