SyntaxSqlnet: Syntax tree networks for complex and cross-domain text-to-SQL task

Tao Yu, Michihiro Yasunaga, Kai Yang, Rui Zhang, Dongxu Wang, Zifan Li, Dragomir R. Radev

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

130 Scopus citations

Abstract

Most existing studies in text-to-SQL tasks do not require generating complex SQL queries with multiple clauses or sub-queries, and generalizing to new, unseen databases. In this paper we propose SyntaxSQLNet, a syntax tree network to address the complex and cross-domain text-to-SQL generation task. SyntaxSQLNet employs a SQL specific syntax tree-based decoder with SQL generation path history and table-aware column attention encoders. We evaluate SyntaxSQLNet on a new large-scale text-to-SQL corpus containing databases with multiple tables and complex SQL queries containing multiple SQL clauses and nested queries. We use a database split setting where databases in the test set are unseen during training. Experimental results show that SyntaxSQLNet can handle a significantly greater number of complex SQL examples than prior work, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model by 9.5% in exact matching accuracy. To our knowledge, we are the first to study this complex text-to-SQL task. Our task and models with the latest updates are available at https://yale-lily.github.io/seq2sql/spider.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018
EditorsEllen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun'ichi Tsujii
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages1653-1663
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781948087841
StatePublished - 2018
Event2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018 - Brussels, Belgium
Duration: Oct 31 2018Nov 4 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018

Conference

Conference2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2018
Country/TerritoryBelgium
CityBrussels
Period10/31/1811/4/18

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems

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