DCG-SQL: Enhancing In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph
Jihyung Lee, Jin-Seop Lee, Jaehoon Lee, YunSeok Choi, Jee-Hyong Lee
Abstract
Text-to-SQL, which translates a natural language question into an SQL query, has advanced with in-context learning of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods show little improvement in performance compared to randomly chosen demonstrations, and significant performance drops when smaller LLMs (e.g., Llama 3.1-8B) are used. This indicates that these methods heavily rely on the intrinsic capabilities of hyper-scaled LLMs, rather than effectively retrieving useful demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for effectively retrieving demonstrations and generating SQL queries. We construct a Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph, which contains key information and semantic relationship between a question and its database schema items. This graph-based structure enables effective representation of Text-to-SQL samples and retrieval of useful demonstrations for in-context learning. Experimental results on the Spider benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing consistent improvements in SQL generation performance and efficiency across both hyper-scaled LLMs and small LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/jjklle/DCG-SQL.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.acl-long.748
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Vienna, Austria
- Editors:
- Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 15397–15412
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.748/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jihyung Lee, Jin-Seop Lee, Jaehoon Lee, YunSeok Choi, and Jee-Hyong Lee. 2025. DCG-SQL: Enhancing In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15397–15412, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- DCG-SQL: Enhancing In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Deep Contextual Schema Link Graph (Lee et al., ACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.748.pdf