Rethinking Semantic Parsing for Large Language Models: Enhancing LLM Performance with Semantic Hints

ACL ARR 2024 December Submission756 Authors

Abstract: Semantic Parsing aims to capture the meaning of a sentence and convert it into a logical, structured form. Previous studies show that semantic parsing enhances the performance of smaller models (e.g., BERT) on downstream tasks. However, it remains unclear whether the improvements extend similarly to LLMs. In this paper, our empirical findings reveal that, unlike smaller models, directly adding semantic parsing results into LLMs reduces their performance. To overcome this, we propose SENSE, a novel prompting approach that embeds semantic hints within the prompt. Experiments show that SENSE consistently improves LLMs' performance across various tasks, highlighting the potential of integrating semantic information to improve LLM capabilities.

Paper Type: Short

Research Area: Language Modeling

Research Area Keywords: Semantic Parsing, Large Language Models

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English, Chinese, Germany

Submission Number: 756