No Arabic abstract
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 Spider dataset this framework boosts the exact match accuracy to 57.2%, surpassing its best counterparts by 8.7% absolute improvement. Further augmented with BERT, it achieves the new state-of-the-art performance of 65.6% on the Spider leaderboard. In addition, we observe qualitative improvements in the models understanding of schema linking and alignment. Our implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/Microsoft/rat-sql.
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 achieve significant gains on the recently-released Spider dataset with 42.94% exact match accuracy, compared to the 18.96% reported in published work.
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 of schema linking information onto the Spider dataset. We demonstrate the usefulness of the annotated data and how to analyze the current state-of-the-art neural models.
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 auxiliary tasks for better modeling the structural data in S2S generation. In addition, we improve and propose a clause-sensitive execution guided (EG) decoding strategy to overcome the limitation of EG decoding for generative model. The experiments show that the proposed method improves the performance of seq-to-seq model in both schema linking and grammar correctness and establishes new state-of-the-art on WikiSQL benchmark. The results indicate that the capacity of vanilla seq-to-seq architecture for text-to-SQL may have been under-estimated.
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 existing methods in both the settings with or without EG. We show the schema dependency learning partially cover the benefit from EG and alleviates the need for it. SDSQL without EG significantly reduces time consumption during inference, sacrificing only a small amount of performance and provides more flexibility for downstream applications.
A new method for Text-to-SQL parsing, Grammar Pre-training (GP), is proposed to decode deep relations between question and database. Firstly, to better utilize the information of databases, a random value is added behind a question word which is recognized as a column, and the new sentence serves as the model input. Secondly, initialization of vectors for decoder part is optimized, with reference to the former encoding so that question information can be concerned. Finally, a new approach called flooding level is adopted to get the non-zero training loss which can generalize better results. By encoding the sentence with GRAPPA and RAT-SQL model, we achieve better performance on spider, a cross-DB Text-to-SQL dataset (72.8 dev, 69.8 test). Experiments show that our method is easier to converge during training and has excellent robustness.