Know What I don’t Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unknown Questions for Text-to-SQL

Bing Wang, Yan Gao, Zhoujun Li, Jian-Guang Lou


Abstract
The task of text-to-SQL aims to convert a natural language question into its corresponding SQL query within the context of relational tables. Existing text-to-SQL parsers generate a plausible SQL query for an arbitrary user question, thereby failing to correctly handle problematic user questions. To formalize this problem, we conduct a preliminary study on the observed ambiguous and unanswerable cases in text-to-SQL and summarize them into 6 feature categories. Correspondingly, we identify the causes behind each category and propose requirements for handling ambiguous and unanswerable questions. Following this study, we propose a simple yet effective counterfactual example generation approach that automatically produces ambiguous and unanswerable text-to-SQL examples. Furthermore, we propose a weakly supervised DTE (Detecting-Then-Explaining) model for error detection, localization, and explanation. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best result on both real-world examples and generated examples compared with various baselines. We release our data and code at: https://github.com/wbbeyourself/DTE.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.352
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5701–5714
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.352
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.352
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bing Wang, Yan Gao, Zhoujun Li, and Jian-Guang Lou. 2023. Know What I don’t Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unknown Questions for Text-to-SQL. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 5701–5714, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Know What I don’t Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unknown Questions for Text-to-SQL (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.352.pdf