Execution-Guided Neural Program Decoding

Abstract

We present a neural semantic parser that translatesnatural language questions intoexecutableSQLqueries with two key ideas. First, we develop anencoder-decoder model, where the decoder usesa simple type system of SQL to constraint theoutput prediction, and propose a value-based losswhen copying from input tokens. Second, we ex-plore using the execution semantics of SQL to re-pair decoded programs that result in runtime erroror return empty result. We propose two model-agnostics repair approaches, an ensemble modeland a local program repair, and demonstrate theireffectiveness over the original model. We evalu-ate our model on the WikiSQL dataset and showthat our model achieves close to state-of-the-artresults with lesser model complexity.