Towards complex text-to-SQL in cross-domain database with intermediate representation

  • Jiaqi Guo
  • , Zecheng Zhan
  • , Yan Gao
  • , Yan Xiao
  • , Jian Guang Lou
  • , Ting Liu
  • , Dongmei Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

240 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present a neural approach called IRNet for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL. IRNet aims to address two challenges: 1) the mismatch between intents expressed in natural language (NL) and the implementation details in SQL; 2) the challenge in predicting columns caused by the large number of out-of-domain words. Instead of end-to-end synthesizing a SQL query, IRNet decomposes the synthesis process into three phases. In the first phase, IRNet performs a schema linking over a question and a database schema. Then, IRNet adopts a grammar-based neural model to synthesize a SemQL query which is an intermediate representation that we design to bridge NL and SQL. Finally, IRNet deterministically infers a SQL query from the synthesized SemQL query with domain knowledge. On the challenging Text-to-SQL benchmark Spider, IRNet achieves 46.7% accuracy, obtaining 19.5% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches. At the time of writing, IRNet achieves the first position on the Spider leaderboard.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACL 2019 - 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages4524-4535
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781950737482
StatePublished - 2020
Event57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2019 - Florence, Italy
Duration: 28 Jul 20192 Aug 2019

Publication series

NameACL 2019 - 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2019
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityFlorence
Period28/07/192/08/19

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