Learning Synchronous Grammars for Semantic Parsing with Lambda Calculus

This paper presents the first empirical results to our knowledge on learning synchronous grammars that generate logical forms. Using statistical machine translation techniques, a semantic parser based on a synchronous context-free grammar augmented with - operators is learned given a set of training sentences and their correct logical forms. The resulting parser is shown to be the best- performing system so far in a database query domain.