Statistical Learning for Semantic Parsing: A Survey

A long-term goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to provide machines with the capability of understanding natural language. Understanding natural language may be referred as the system must produce a correct response to the received input order. This response can be a robot move, an answer to a question, etc. One way to achieve this goal is semantic parsing. It parses utterances into semantic representations called logical form, a representation of many important linguistic phenomena that can be understood by machines. Semantic parsing is a fundamental problem in natural language understanding area. In recent years, researchers have made tremendous progress in this field. In this paper, we review recent algorithms for semantic parsing including both conventional machine learning approaches and deep learning approaches. We first give an overview of a semantic parsing system, then we summary a general way to do semantic parsing in statistical learning. With the rise of deep learning, we will pay more attention on the deep learning based semantic parsing, especially for the application of Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA). At last, we survey several benchmarks for KBQA.