Augmenting Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL Datasets with Self-Play

Qi Liu, Zihuiwen Ye, Tao Yu, Linfeng Song, Phil Blunsom


Abstract
The task of context-dependent text-to-SQL aims to convert multi-turn user utterances to formal SQL queries. This is a challenging task due to both the scarcity of training data from which to learn complex contextual dependencies and to generalize to unseen databases. In this paper we explore augmenting the training datasets using self-play, which leverages contextual information to synthesize new interactions to adapt the model to new databases. We first design a SQL-to-text model conditioned on a sampled goal query, which represents a user’s intent, that then converses with a text-to-SQL semantic parser to generate new interactions. We then filter the synthesized interactions and retrain the models with the augmented data. We find that self-play improves the accuracy of a strong baseline on SParC and CoSQL, two widely used cross-domain text-to-SQL datasets. Our analysis shows that self-play simulates various conversational thematic relations, enhances cross-domain generalization and improves beam-search.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.411
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:
5608–5620
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.411
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.411
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qi Liu, Zihuiwen Ye, Tao Yu, Linfeng Song, and Phil Blunsom. 2022. Augmenting Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL Datasets with Self-Play. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 5608–5620, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Augmenting Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL Datasets with Self-Play (Liu et al., Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2022.findings-emnlp.411.pdf
Software:
 2022.findings-emnlp.411.software.zip