Semantic Parsing and Meaning Representations › Summary

Semantic parsing maps natural language to formal meaning representations. Logical forms use predicates, quantifiers, and lambda calculus to make composition explicit. AMR uses graphs and PropBank-style roles to represent predicate-argument structure and reentrancy. Text-to-SQL maps questions to executable database queries. In the department example, schema linking and query structure determine which students are counted. Denotations are defined by semantics; execution can compute results for validation and weak supervision. Constrained generation can enforce encoded grammar and semantic policies when the integration is sound and the output reaches an accepted stopping state, but syntactic validity does not guarantee the intended meaning. The best representation depends on the task, and the best evaluation checks denotations, validity, and robustness rather than surface strings alone.