Enhancing Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models: A Study on Prompt Design Strategies

Linyong Nan, Yilun Zhao, Weijin Zou, Narutatsu Ri, Jaesung Tae, Ellen Zhang, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev


Abstract
In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new approach to various natural language processing tasks, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to make predictions based on context that has been supplemented with a few examples or task-specific instructions. In this paper, we aim to extend this method to question answering tasks that utilize structured knowledge sources, and improve Text-to-SQL systems by exploring various prompt design strategies for employing LLMs. We conduct a systematic investigation into different demonstration selection methods and optimal instruction formats for prompting LLMs in the Text-to-SQL task. Our approach involves leveraging the syntactic structure of an example’s SQL query to retrieve demonstrations, and we demonstrate that pursuing both diversity and similarity in demonstration selection leads to enhanced performance. Furthermore, we show that LLMs benefit from database-related knowledge augmentations. Our most effective strategy outperforms the state-of-the-art system by 2.5 points (Execution Accuracy) and the best fine-tuned system by 5.1 points on the Spider dataset. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in adapting LLMs to the Text-to-SQL task, and we present an analysis of the factors contributing to the success of our strategy.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.996
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14935–14956
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.996
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.996
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Linyong Nan, Yilun Zhao, Weijin Zou, Narutatsu Ri, Jaesung Tae, Ellen Zhang, Arman Cohan, and Dragomir Radev. 2023. Enhancing Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models: A Study on Prompt Design Strategies. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 14935–14956, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models: A Study on Prompt Design Strategies (Nan et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.996.pdf