CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers

Dongling Xiao, LinZheng Chai, Qian-Wen Zhang, Zhao Yan, Zhoujun Li, Yunbo Cao


Abstract
Context-dependent text-to-SQL is the task of translating multi-turn questions into database-related SQL queries. Existing methods typically focus on making full use of history context or previously predicted SQL for currently SQL parsing, while neglecting to explicitly comprehend the schema and conversational dependency, such as co-reference, ellipsis and user focus change. In this paper, we propose CQR-SQL, which uses auxiliary Conversational Question Reformulation (CQR) learning to explicitly exploit schema and decouple contextual dependency for multi-turn SQL parsing. Specifically, we first present a schema enhanced recursive CQR method to produce domain-relevant self-contained questions. Secondly, we train CQR-SQL models to map the semantics of multi-turn questions and auxiliary self-contained questions into the same latent space through schema grounding consistency task and tree-structured SQL parsing consistency task, which enhances the abilities of SQL parsing by adequately contextual understanding. At the time of writing, our CQR-SQL achieves new state-of-the-art results on two context-dependent text-to-SQL benchmarks SParC and CoSQL.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.150
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2055–2068
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.150
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.150
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dongling Xiao, LinZheng Chai, Qian-Wen Zhang, Zhao Yan, Zhoujun Li, and Yunbo Cao. 2022. CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 2055–2068, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers (Xiao et al., Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2022.findings-emnlp.150.pdf