  Tasks like code generation and semantic parsing require mapping unstructured
(or partially structured) inputs to well-formed, executable outputs. We
introduce abstract syntax networks, a modeling framework for these problems.
The outputs are represented as abstract syntax trees (ASTs) and constructed by
a decoder with a dynamically-determined modular structure paralleling the
structure of the output tree. On the benchmark Hearthstone dataset for code
generation, our model obtains 79.2 BLEU and 22.7% exact match accuracy,
compared to previous state-of-the-art values of 67.1 and 6.1%. Furthermore, we
perform competitively on the Atis, Jobs, and Geo semantic parsing datasets with
no task-specific engineering.
