Research
NLP
Learning Programmatic Idioms for Scalable Semantic Parsing
November 4, 2019
Abstract
Programmers typically organize executable source code using high-level coding patterns or idiomatic structures such as nested loops, exception handlers and recursive blocks, rather than as individual code tokens. In contrast, state of the art (SOTA) semantic parsers still map natural language instructions to source code by building the code syntax tree one node at a time. In this paper, we introduce an iterative method to extract code idioms from large source code corpora by repeatedly collapsing most-frequent depth-2 subtrees of their syntax trees, and train semantic parsers to apply these idioms during decoding. Applying idiom-based decoding on a recent context-dependent semantic parsing task improves the SOTA by 2.2% BLEU score while reducing training time by more than 50%. This improved speed enables us to scale up the model by training on an extended training set that is 5× larger, to further move up the SOTA by an additional 2.3% BLEU and 0.9% exact match. Finally, idioms also significantly improve accuracy of semantic parsing to SQL on the ATIS-SQ
AUTHORS
Research Topics
Related Publications
March 17, 2026
NLP
Omnilingual MT: Machine Translation for 1,600 Languages
Omnilingual MT Team, Belen Alastruey, Niyati Bafna, Andrea Caciolai, Kevin Heffernan, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Christophe Ropers, Eduardo Sánchez, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Ioannis Tsiamas, Chierh CHENG, Joe Chuang, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Mark Duppenthaler, Nate Ekberg, Cynthia Gao, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, João Maria Janeiro, Jean Maillard, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Edan Toledo, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Rashel Moritz, Alexandre Mourachko, Surya Parimi, Mary Williamson, Shireen Yates, David Dale, Marta R. Costa-jussa
March 17, 2026
March 17, 2026
Speech & Audio
Omnilingual SONAR: Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Sentence Embeddings Bridging Massively Multilingual Text and Speech
Omnilingual SONAR Team, João Maria Janeiro, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Ioannis Tsiamas, Yen Meng, Vivek Iyer, Guillem Ramirez, Loic Barrault, Belen Alastruey, Yu-An Chung, Marta R. Costa-jussa, David Dale, Kevin Heffernan, Jaehyeong Jo, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Holger Schwenk, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne
March 17, 2026
February 27, 2026
Human & Machine Intelligence
Unified Vision–Language Modeling via Concept Space Alignment
Yifu Qiu, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk
February 27, 2026
November 10, 2025
Speech & Audio
Omnilingual ASR: Open-Source Multilingual Speech Recognition for 1600+ Languages
Omnilingual ASR team, Gil Keren, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Yen Meng, Christophe Ropers, Matthew Setzler, Skyler Wang, Ife Adebara, Michael Auli, Can Balioglu, Kevin Chan, Chierh Cheng, Joe Chuang, Caley Drooff, Mark Duppenthaler, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Alexander Erben, Cynthia Gao, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Kehan Lyu, Sagar Miglani, Vineel Pratap, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Safiyyah Saleem, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Zheng-Xin Yong, Yu-An Chung, Jean Maillard, Rashel Moritz, Alexandre Mourachko, Mary Williamson, Shireen Yates
November 10, 2025
October 31, 2019
NLP
Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission
Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
October 31, 2019
March 14, 2019
NLP
On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication | Facebook AI Research
Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau, Joelle Pineau, Yann Dauphin
March 14, 2019
January 13, 2020
NLP
Scaling up online speech recognition using ConvNets | Facebook AI Research
Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Jacob Kahn, Gilad Avidov, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Awni Hannun, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert
January 13, 2020
April 30, 2018
NLP
Computer Vision
Mastering the Dungeon: Grounded Language Learning by Mechanical Turker Descent | Facebook AI Research
Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston
April 30, 2018
Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI
We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models
Meta © 2026