Kai Yang


2018

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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 Radev
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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.

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Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task
Tao Yu | Rui Zhang | Kai Yang | Michihiro Yasunaga | Dongxu Wang | Zifan Li | James Ma | Irene Li | Qingning Yao | Shanelle Roman | Zilin Zhang | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present Spider, a large-scale complex and cross-domain semantic parsing and text-to-SQL dataset annotated by 11 college students. It consists of 10,181 questions and 5,693 unique complex SQL queries on 200 databases with multiple tables covering 138 different domains. We define a new complex and cross-domain semantic parsing and text-to-SQL task so that different complicated SQL queries and databases appear in train and test sets. In this way, the task requires the model to generalize well to both new SQL queries and new database schemas. Therefore, Spider is distinct from most of the previous semantic parsing tasks because they all use a single database and have the exact same program in the train set and the test set. We experiment with various state-of-the-art models and the best model achieves only 9.7% exact matching accuracy on a database split setting. This shows that Spider presents a strong challenge for future research. Our dataset and task with the most recent updates are publicly available at https://yale-lily.github.io/seq2sql/spider.

2016

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Exploring Topic Discriminating Power of Words in Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Kai Yang | Yi Cai | Zhenhong Chen | Ho-fung Leung | Raymond Lau
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and its variants have been widely used to discover latent topics in textual documents. However, some of topics generated by LDA may be noisy with irrelevant words scattering across these topics. We name this kind of words as topic-indiscriminate words, which tend to make topics more ambiguous and less interpretable by humans. In our work, we propose a new topic model named TWLDA, which assigns low weights to words with low topic discriminating power (ability). Our experimental results show that the proposed approach, which effectively reduces the number of topic-indiscriminate words in discovered topics, improves the effectiveness of LDA.