MURRE: Multi-Hop Table Retrieval with Removal for Open-Domain Text-to-SQL
Xuanliang Zhang, Dingzirui Wang, Longxu Dou, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
Abstract
The open-domain text-to-SQL task aims to retrieve question-relevant tables from massive databases and generate SQL. However, the performance of current methods is constrained by single-hop retrieval, and existing multi-hop retrieval of open-domain question answering is not directly applicable due to the tendency to retrieve tables similar to the retrieved ones but irrelevant to the question. Since the questions in text-to-SQL usually contain all required information, while previous multi-hop retrieval supplements the questions with retrieved documents. Therefore, we propose the multi-hop table retrieval with removal (MURRE), which removes previously retrieved information from the question to guide the retriever towards unretrieved relevant tables. Our experiments on two open-domain text-to-SQL datasets demonstrate an average improvement of 5.7% over the previous state-of-the-art results.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.coling-main.386
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- January
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, UAE
- Editors:
- Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5789–5806
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-affiliations/2025.coling-main.386/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Xuanliang Zhang, Dingzirui Wang, Longxu Dou, Qingfu Zhu, and Wanxiang Che. 2025. MURRE: Multi-Hop Table Retrieval with Removal for Open-Domain Text-to-SQL. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5789–5806, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- MURRE: Multi-Hop Table Retrieval with Removal for Open-Domain Text-to-SQL (Zhang et al., COLING 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-affiliations/2025.coling-main.386.pdf