---
title: "Simpler Context-Dependent Logical Forms via Model Projections"
description: "Model C replaces arguments with concrete world objects, producing flat forms. 100% accuracy. 30 references, cited by 60 papers here."
authors: ["Reginald Long", "Panupong Pasupat", "Percy Liang"]
year: 2016
venue: "arXiv:1606.05378"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05378"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.1606.05378"
arxiv: "1606.05378"
licence: "arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute"
licence_url: "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/long-2016-simpler-context-dependent-logical-forms/"
---
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# Simpler Context-Dependent Logical Forms via Model Projections

**Authors:** Reginald Long, [Panupong Pasupat](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/panupong-pasupat/) and [Percy Liang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/percy-liang/) · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** [arXiv:1606.05378](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/) ([ACL 2016](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acl/2016/)) · **Licence:** [arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute](http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05378) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.05378) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.1606.05378](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1606.05378) · [arXiv 1606.05378](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05378) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2963372003)

**Citations:** 85 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [60](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/long-2016-simpler-context-dependent-logical-forms/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper tackles learning to carry out multi-step instructions when the only supervision is the resulting world state, not the logical forms behind it. Without annotated logical forms or a seed lexicon, the learner must search a huge space of candidate programs. Utterances that refer back to earlier steps through ellipsis, pronouns or repeated actions make that space even larger. Long, Pasupat and Liang respond by projecting a full parser onto coarser models that treat groups of logical forms as equivalent:

- **Model A** keeps alignments between words and predicates.
- **Model B** discards alignments and predicts whole logical forms.
- **Model C** replaces arguments with concrete world objects, producing flat forms.

The authors also introduce a left-to-right parser that needs no explicit span alignment. They collect three grounded datasets via Amazon Mechanical Turk: ALCHEMY, SCENE and TANGRAMS. With a fixed beam, the simplest model, Model C, usually wins. On a synthetic task with a large beam, Model A becomes perfect. Because all three models share features, weights from Model C can initialize Model A. The study shows how trading expressivity for tractability can pay off, and it supplies new benchmarks for context-dependent semantic parsing.

## Key points
- **Datasets:** ALCHEMY (4560 examples), SCENE (4402) and TANGRAMS (4989) were collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each example has 5 utterances describing successive world-state changes. They cover ellipsis, entity anaphora and action anaphora.
- **Context references:** The grammar includes special tokens `args[i][j]` and `actions[i]`, which point to arguments and actions of earlier logical forms. References are resolved jointly during parsing rather than in a separate step.
- **Synthetic task:** Model A learns nothing with beam sizes below 240 but reaches 100% accuracy above that. Model C is best at small beams (under 40).
- **Bootstrapping:** Initializing Model A with Model C's parameters gives 100% even with smaller beams.
- **Error analysis:** Model B's errors come mostly from correct forms falling off the beam (47%). Model C's errors come mostly from misreading context (50%), reflecting its limited expressivity. Code and data are available on CodaLab.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Reginald Long, Panupong Pasupat and Percy Liang. 2016. Simpler Context-Dependent Logical Forms via Model Projections. arXiv:1606.05378.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{long2016simpler,
  title = {{Simpler Context-Dependent Logical Forms via Model Projections}},
  author = {Reginald Long, Panupong Pasupat and Percy Liang},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.1606.05378},
  eprint = {1606.05378},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1606.05378}
}
```

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*Updated 2 November 2026*