“What Do You Mean by That?” A Parser-Independent Interactive Approach for Enhancing Text-to-SQL

Yuntao Li, Bei Chen, Qian Liu, Yan Gao, Jian-Guang Lou, Yan Zhang, Dongmei Zhang


Abstract
In Natural Language Interfaces to Databases systems, the text-to-SQL technique allows users to query databases by using natural language questions. Though significant progress in this area has been made recently, most parsers may fall short when they are deployed in real systems. One main reason stems from the difficulty of fully understanding the users’ natural language questions. In this paper, we include human in the loop and present a novel parser-independent interactive approach (PIIA) that interacts with users using multi-choice questions and can easily work with arbitrary parsers. Experiments were conducted on two cross-domain datasets, the WikiSQL and the more complex Spider, with five state-of-the-art parsers. These demonstrated that PIIA is capable of enhancing the text-to-SQL performance with limited interaction turns by using both simulation and human evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.561
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6913–6922
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.561
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.561
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuntao Li, Bei Chen, Qian Liu, Yan Gao, Jian-Guang Lou, Yan Zhang, and Dongmei Zhang. 2020. “What Do You Mean by That?” A Parser-Independent Interactive Approach for Enhancing Text-to-SQL. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 6913–6922, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“What Do You Mean by That?” A Parser-Independent Interactive Approach for Enhancing Text-to-SQL (Li et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.561.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939001