A Tale of Two Linkings: Dynamically Gating between Schema Linking and Structural Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsing

Sanxing Chen, Aidan San, Xiaodong Liu, Yangfeng Ji


Abstract
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 based on the entity being generated, thus we propose to dynamically choose between them using a gating mechanism. Integrating the proposed method with two graph neural network-based semantic parsers together with BERT representations demonstrates substantial gains in parsing accuracy on the challenging Spider dataset. Analyses show that our proposed method helps to enhance the structure of the model output when generating complicated SQL queries and offers more explainable predictions.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.260
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2900–2912
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.260
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.260
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sanxing Chen, Aidan San, Xiaodong Liu, and Yangfeng Ji. 2020. A Tale of Two Linkings: Dynamically Gating between Schema Linking and Structural Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsing. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2900–2912, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Tale of Two Linkings: Dynamically Gating between Schema Linking and Structural Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsing (Chen et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.coling-main.260.pdf
Code
 sanxing-chen/linking-tale