ACT-SQL: In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Automatically-Generated Chain-of-Thought

Hanchong Zhang, Ruisheng Cao, Lu Chen, Hongshen Xu, Kai Yu


Abstract
Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven to have strong abilities in various domains and tasks. We study the problem of prompt designing in the text-to-SQL task and attempt to improve the LLMs’ reasoning ability when generating SQL queries. Besides the trivial few-shot in-context learning setting, we design our chain-of-thought (CoT) prompt with a similar method to schema linking. We provide a method named ACT-SQL to automatically generate auto-CoT exemplars and thus the whole process doesn’t need manual labeling. Our approach is cost-saving since we only use the LLMs’ API call once when generating one SQL query. Furthermore, we extend our in-context learning method to the multi-turn text-to-SQL task. The experiment results show that the LLMs’ performance can benefit from our ACT-SQL approach. Our approach achieves SOTA performance on the Spider dev set among existing in-context learning approaches.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.227
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3501–3532
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.227
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.227
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hanchong Zhang, Ruisheng Cao, Lu Chen, Hongshen Xu, and Kai Yu. 2023. ACT-SQL: In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Automatically-Generated Chain-of-Thought. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3501–3532, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ACT-SQL: In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Automatically-Generated Chain-of-Thought (Zhang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.findings-emnlp.227.pdf