In this work, we present X-SQL, a new network architecture for the problem of parsing natural language to SQL query. X-SQL proposes to enhance the structural schema representation with the contextual output from BERT-style pre-training model, and together with type information to learn a new schema representation for down-stream tasks. We evaluated X-SQL on the WikiSQL dataset and show its new state-of-the-art performance.
The generalizability to new databases is of vital importance to Text-to-SQL systems which aim to parse human utterances into SQL statements. Existing works achieve this goal by leveraging the exact matching method to identify the lexical matching between the question words and the schema items. However, these methods fail in other challenging scenarios, such as the synonym substitution in which the surface form differs between the corresponding question words and schema items. In this paper, we propose a framework named ISESL-SQL to iteratively build a semantic enhanced schema-linking graph be…
Tel-Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Research on parsing language to SQL has largely ignored the structure of the database (DB) schema, either because the DB was very simple, or because it was observed at both training and test time. In Spider, a recently-released text-to-SQL dataset, new and complex DBs are given at test time, and so the structure of the DB schema can inform the predicted SQL query. In this paper, we present an encoder-decoder semantic parser, where the structure of the DB schema is encoded with a graph neural network, and this representation is later used at both encoding and decoding time. Evaluation shows tha…
Text-to-SQL aims to map natural language questions to SQL queries. The sketch-based method combined with execution-guided (EG) decoding strategy has shown a strong performance on the WikiSQL benchmark. However, execution-guided decoding relies on database execution, which significantly slows down the inference process and is hence unsatisfactory for many real-world applications. In this paper, we present the Schema Dependency guided multi-task Text-to-SQL model (SDSQL) to guide the network to effectively capture the interactions between questions and schemas. The proposed model outperforms all…
Track-SQL: Enhancing Generative Language Models with Dual-Extractive Modules for Schema and Context Tracking in Multi-turn Text-to-SQL
School of Computer Science, Guangdong University of Technology（广东技术大学计算机科学学院）；Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ)（广东人工智能与数字经济实验室）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；College of Science, Shantou University（汕头大学理学院）
Text-to-SQL is a crucial task toward developing methods for understanding natural language by computers. Recent neural approaches deliver excellent performance; however, models that are difficult to interpret inhibit future developments. Hence, this study aims to provide a better approach toward the interpretation of neural models. We hypothesize that the internal behavior of models at hand becomes much easier to analyze if we identify the detailed performance of schema linking simultaneously as the additional information of the text-to-SQL performance. We provide the ground-truth annotation o…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
The task of converting a natural language question into an executable SQL query, known as text-to-SQL, is an important branch of semantic parsing. The state-of-the-art graph-based encoder has been successfully used in this task but does not model the question syntax well. In this paper, we propose S$^2$SQL, injecting Syntax to question-Schema graph encoder for Text-to-SQL parsers, which effectively leverages the syntactic dependency information of questions in text-to-SQL to improve the performance. We also employ the decoupling constraint to induce diverse relational edge embedding, which fur…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学教育部计算语言学重点实验室）
Context-dependent text-to-SQL task has drawn much attention in recent years. Previous models on context-dependent text-to-SQL task only concentrate on utilizing historical user inputs. In this work, in addition to using encoders to capture historical information of user inputs, we propose a database schema interaction graph encoder to utilize historicalal information of database schema items. In decoding phase, we introduce a gate mechanism to weigh the importance of different vocabularies and then make the prediction of SQL tokens. We evaluate our model on the benchmark SParC and CoSQL datase…
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
In Text-to-SQL semantic parsing, selecting the correct entities (tables and columns) for the generated SQL query is both crucial and challenging; the parser is required to connect the natural language (NL) question and the SQL query to the structured knowledge in the database. We formulate two linking processes to address this challenge: schema linking which links explicit NL mentions to the database and structural linking which links the entities in the output SQL with their structural relationships in the database schema. Intuitively, the effectiveness of these two linking processes changes …
Context-dependent text-to-SQL is the task of translating multi-turn questions into database-related SQL queries. Existing methods typically focus on making full use of history context or previously predicted SQL for currently SQL parsing, while neglecting to explicitly comprehend the schema and conversational dependency, such as co-reference, ellipsis and user focus change. In this paper, we propose CQR-SQL, which uses auxiliary Conversational Question Reformulation (CQR) learning to explicitly exploit schema and decouple contextual dependency for SQL parsing. Specifically, we first present a …
LinkAlign: Scalable Schema Linking for Real-World Large-Scale Multi-Database Text-to-SQL
China Academy of Information and Communications Technology（中国信息通信技术研究院）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；University of International Business and Economics（国际经济贸易大学）
School of Computer Science, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学计算机学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；College of Science, Shantou University（汕头大学理学院）
The Text-to-SQL task, aiming to translate the natural language of the questions into SQL queries, has drawn much attention recently. One of the most challenging problems of Text-to-SQL is how to generalize the trained model to the unseen database schemas, also known as the cross-domain Text-to-SQL task. The key lies in the generalizability of (i) the encoding method to model the question and the database schema and (ii) the question-schema linking method to learn the mapping between words in the question and tables/columns in the database schema. Focusing on the above two key issues, we propos…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）
In this paper, we propose a novel SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing, which leverages contextual information to enrich natural language (NL) utterance and table schema representations for text-to-SQL conversations. Concretely, we propose two novel pre-training objectives which respectively explore the context-dependent interactions of NL utterances and SQL queries within each text-to-SQL conversation: (i) schema state tracking (SST) objective that tracks and explores the schema states of context-dependent SQL queries in the form of schema-states by…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
The importance of building text-to-SQL parsers which can be applied to new databases has long been acknowledged, and a critical step to achieve this goal is schema linking, i.e., properly recognizing mentions of unseen columns or tables when generating SQLs. In this work, we propose a novel framework to elicit relational structures from large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) via a probing procedure based on Poincaré distance metric, and use the induced relations to augment current graph-based parsers for better schema linking. Compared with commonly-used rule-based methods for schema l…
Cooperative SQL Generation for Segmented Databases By Using Multi-functional LLM Agents
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机学院）；Big Data Shortage and Management, MIIT（工业和信息化部大数据短缺与管理局）；School of Computing, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学计算机学院）；School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学计算与信息系统学院）
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
When translating natural language questions into SQL queries to answer questions from a database, contemporary semantic parsing models struggle to generalize to unseen database schemas. The generalization challenge lies in (a) encoding the database relations in an accessible way for the semantic parser, and (b) modeling alignment between database columns and their mentions in a given query. We present a unified framework, based on the relation-aware self-attention mechanism, to address schema encoding, schema linking, and feature representation within a text-to-SQL encoder. On the challenging …
EviLink: Multi-Path Schema Linking with Uncertainty-Guided Evidence Acquisition for Large-Scale Text-to-SQL
School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学软件学院）；State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University（浙江大学CAD&CG国家重点实验室）；Tencent TEG（腾讯TEG）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University（北京大学数学科学学院）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；iFLYTEK Research（讯飞研究院）
The task of multi-turn text-to-SQL semantic parsing aims to translate natural language utterances in an interaction into SQL queries in order to answer them using a database which normally contains multiple table schemas. Previous studies on this task usually utilized contextual information to enrich utterance representations and to further influence the decoding process. While they ignored to describe and track the interaction states which are determined by history SQL queries and are related with the intent of current utterance. In this paper, two kinds of interaction states are defined base…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Jožef Stefan Institute（约瑟夫·斯特凡研究所）；Nanning Central Sub-branch of the People’s Bank of China（中国人民银行南宁中心支行）；Guangxi University of Finance and Economics（广西财经学院）；Beijing MeiyiLab Co.,Ltd.（北京美仪实验室有限公司）
Recently, there has been significant progress in studying neural networks to translate text descriptions into SQL queries. Despite achieving good performance on some public benchmarks, existing text-to-SQL models typically rely on the lexical matching between words in natural language (NL) questions and tokens in table schemas, which may render the models vulnerable to attacks that break the schema linking mechanism. In this work, we investigate the robustness of text-to-SQL models to synonym substitution. In particular, we introduce Spider-Syn, a human-curated dataset based on the Spider benc…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；State Key Lab of Media Convergence Production Technology and Systems（媒体融合生产技术与系统国家重点实验室）
Given a database schema, Text-to-SQL aims to translate a natural language question into the corresponding SQL query. Under the setup of cross-domain, traditional semantic parsing models struggle to adapt to unseen database schemas. To improve the model generalization capability for rare and unseen schemas, we propose a new architecture, ShadowGNN, which processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels. By ignoring names of semantic items in databases, abstract schemas are exploited in a well-designed graph projection neural network to obtain delexicalized representation of question and schema…
When translating natural language questions into SQL queries to answer questions from a database, we would like our methods to generalize to domains and database schemas outside of the training set. To handle complex questions and database schemas with a neural encoder-decoder paradigm, it is critical to properly encode the schema as part of the input with the question. In this paper, we use relation-aware self-attention within the encoder so that it can reason about how the tables and columns in the provided schema relate to each other and use this information in interpreting the question. We…
DCG-SQL: Enhancing In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Sungkyunkwan University（人工智能系，成均馆大学）；Department of Immersive Media Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University（沉浸媒体工程系，成均馆大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University（计算机科学与工程系，成均馆大学）
Text-to-SQL parsers typically struggle with databases unseen during the train time. Adapting parsers to new databases is a challenging problem due to the lack of natural language queries in the new schemas. We present ReFill, a framework for synthesizing high-quality and textually diverse parallel datasets for adapting a Text-to-SQL parser to a target schema. ReFill learns to retrieve-and-edit text queries from the existing schemas and transfers them to the target schema. We show that retrieving diverse existing text, masking their schema-specific tokens, and refilling with tokens relevant to …
ProSPy: A Profiling-Driven SQL-Python Agentic Framework for Enterprise Text-to-SQL
State Key Lab of CAD&CG（计算机辅助设计与图形学国家重点实验室）；School of Software Technology（软件技术学院）；Tencent TEG（腾讯科技集团）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University（北京大学数学科学学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
In text-to-SQL task, seq-to-seq models often lead to sub-optimal performance due to limitations in their architecture. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach that adapts transformer-based seq-to-seq model to robust text-to-SQL generation. Instead of inducing constraint to decoder or reformat the task as slot-filling, we propose to train seq-to-seq model with Schema aware Denoising (SeaD), which consists of two denoising objectives that train model to either recover input or predict output from two novel erosion and shuffle noises. These denoising objectives acts as the auxil…
