Sunghun Kim


2019

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NL2pSQL: Generating Pseudo-SQL Queries from Under-Specified Natural Language Questions
Fuxiang Chen | Seung-won Hwang | Jaegul Choo | Jung-Woo Ha | Sunghun Kim
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Generating SQL codes from natural language questions (NL2SQL) is an emerging research area. Existing studies have mainly focused on clear scenarios where specified information is fully given to generate a SQL query. However, in developer forums such as Stack Overflow, questions cover more diverse tasks including table manipulation or performance issues, where a table is not specified. The SQL query posted in Stack Overflow, Pseudo-SQL (pSQL), does not usually contain table schemas and is not necessarily executable, is sufficient to guide developers. Here we describe a new NL2pSQL task to generate pSQL codes from natural language questions on under-specified database issues, NL2pSQL. In addition, we define two new metrics suitable for the proposed NL2pSQL task, Canonical-BLEU and SQL-BLEU, instead of the conventional BLEU. With a baseline model using sequence-to-sequence architecture integrated by denoising autoencoder, we confirm the validity of our task. Experiments show that the proposed NL2pSQL approach yields well-formed queries (up to 43% more than a standard Seq2Seq model). Our code and datasets will be publicly released.