Abstract Syntax Networks for Code Generation and Semantic Parsing

Abstract

Tasks like code generation and semantic parsing require mapping unstructured (or partially structured) inputs to well-formed, executable outputs. We introduce abstract syntax networks, a modeling framework for these problems. The outputs are represented as abstract syntax trees (ASTs) and constructed by a decoder with a dynamically-determined modular structure paralleling the structure of the output tree. On the benchmark HEARTHSTONE dataset for code generation, our model obtains 79.2 BLEU and 22.7% exact match accuracy, compared to previous state-ofthe-art values of 67.1 and 6.1%. Furthermore, we perform competitively on the ATIS, JOBS, and GEO semantic parsing datasets with no task-specific engineering.