  Different from previous surveys in semantic parsing (Kamath and Das, 2018)
and knowledge base question answering(KBQA)(Chakraborty et al., 2019; Zhu et
al., 2019; Hoffner et al., 2017) we try to takes a different perspective on the
study of semantic parsing. Specifically, we will focus on (a)meaning
composition from syntactical structure(Partee, 1975), and (b) the ability of
semantic parsers to handle lexical variation given the context of a knowledge
base (KB). In the following section after an introduction of the field of
semantic parsing and its uses in KBQA, we will describe meaning representation
using grammar formalism CCG (Steedman, 1996). We will discuss semantic
composition using formal languages in Section 2. In section 3 we will consider
systems that uses formal languages e.g. $\lambda$-calculus (Steedman, 1996),
$\lambda$-DCS (Liang, 2013). Section 4 and 5 consider semantic parser using
structured-language for logical form. Section 6 is on different benchmark
datasets ComplexQuestions (Bao et al.,2016) and GraphQuestions (Su et al.,
2016) that can be used to evaluate semantic parser on their ability to answer
complex questions that are highly compositional in nature.
