SeaD: End-to-end Text-to-SQL Generation with Schema-aware Denoising

Kuan Xu, Yongbo Wang, Yongliang Wang, Zihao Wang, Zujie Wen, Yang Dong


Abstract
On the WikiSQL benchmark, most methods tackle the challenge of text-to-SQL with predefined sketch slots and build sophisticated sub-tasks to fill these slots. Though achieving promising results, these methods suffer from over-complex model structure. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach that enables auto-regressive sequence-to-sequence model to robust text-to-SQL generation. Instead of formulating the task of text-to-SQL as slot-filling, we propose to train sequence-to-sequence model with Schema-aware Denoising (SeaD), which consists of two denoising objectives that train model to either recover input or predict output from two novel erosion and shuffle noises. These model-agnostic denoising objectives act as the auxiliary tasks for structural data modeling during sequence-to-sequence generation. In addition, we propose a clause-sensitive execution guided (EG) decoding strategy to overcome the limitation of EG decoding for generative model. The experiments show that the proposed method improves the performance of sequence-to-sequence model in both schema linking and grammar correctness and establishes new state-of-the-art on WikiSQL benchmark. Our work indicates that the capacity of sequence-to-sequence model for text-to-SQL may have been under-estimated and could be enhanced by specialized denoising task.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-naacl.141
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1845–1853
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.141
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-naacl.141
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kuan Xu, Yongbo Wang, Yongliang Wang, Zihao Wang, Zujie Wen, and Yang Dong. 2022. SeaD: End-to-end Text-to-SQL Generation with Schema-aware Denoising. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022, pages 1845–1853, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SeaD: End-to-end Text-to-SQL Generation with Schema-aware Denoising (Xu et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.141.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-naacl.141.mp4
Code
 salesforce/WikiSQL
Data
WikiSQL