Hilaf Hasson
2026
Node-Level Uncertainty Estimation in LLM-Generated SQL
Hilaf Hasson | Ruocheng Guo
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Hilaf Hasson | Ruocheng Guo
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
We present a practical framework for detecting errors in LLM-generated SQL by estimating uncertainty at the level of individual nodes in the query’s abstract syntax tree (AST). Our approach proceeds in two stages. First, we introduce a semantically aware labeling algorithm that, given a generated SQL and a gold reference, assigns node-level correctness without over-penalizing structural containers or alias variation. Second, we represent each node with a rich set of schema-aware and lexical features - capturing identifier validity, alias resolution, type compatibility, ambiguity in scope, and typo signals - and train a supervised classifier to predict per-node error probabilities. We interpret these probabilities as calibrated uncertainty, enabling fine-grained diagnostics that pinpoint exactly where a query is likely to be wrong. Across multiple databases and datasets, our method substantially outperforms token log-probabilities: average AUC improves by +27.44% while maintaining robustness under cross-database evaluation. Beyond serving as an accuracy signal, node-level uncertainty supports targeted repair, human-in-the-loop review, and downstream selective execution. Together, these results establish node-centric, semantically grounded uncertainty estimation as a strong and interpretable alternative to aggregate sequence-level confidence measures.
2024
HyQE: Ranking Contexts with Hypothetical Query Embeddings
Weichao Zhou | Jiaxin Zhang | Hilaf Hasson | Anu Singh | Wenchao Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Weichao Zhou | Jiaxin Zhang | Hilaf Hasson | Anu Singh | Wenchao Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
In retrieval-augmented systems, context ranking techniques are commonly employed to reorder the retrieved contexts based on their relevance to a user query. A standard approach is to measure this relevance through the similarity between contexts and queries in the embedding space. However, such similarity often fails to capture the relevance. Alternatively, large language models (LLMs) have been used for ranking contexts. However, they can encounter scalability issues when the number of candidate contexts grows and the context window sizes of the LLMs remain constrained. Additionally, these approaches require fine-tuning LLMs with domain-specific data. In this work, we introduce a scalable ranking framework that combines embedding similarity and LLM capabilities without requiring LLM fine-tuning. Our framework uses a pre-trained LLM to hypothesize the user query based on the retrieved contexts and ranks the context based on the similarity between the hypothesized queries and the user query. Our framework is efficient at inference time and is compatible with many other retrieval and ranking techniques. Experimental results show that our method improves the ranking performance across multiple benchmarks.