MURRE: Multi-Hop Table Retrieval with Removal for Open-Domain Text-to-SQL

Xuanliang Zhang, Dingzirui Wang, Longxu Dou, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che


Abstract
The open-domain text-to-SQL task aims to retrieve question-relevant tables from massive databases and generate SQL. However, the performance of current methods is constrained by single-hop retrieval, and existing multi-hop retrieval of open-domain question answering is not directly applicable due to the tendency to retrieve tables similar to the retrieved ones but irrelevant to the question. Since the questions in text-to-SQL usually contain all required information, while previous multi-hop retrieval supplements the questions with retrieved documents. Therefore, we propose the multi-hop table retrieval with removal (MURRE), which removes previously retrieved information from the question to guide the retriever towards unretrieved relevant tables. Our experiments on two open-domain text-to-SQL datasets demonstrate an average improvement of 5.7% over the previous state-of-the-art results.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.386
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5789–5806
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.386/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xuanliang Zhang, Dingzirui Wang, Longxu Dou, Qingfu Zhu, and Wanxiang Che. 2025. MURRE: Multi-Hop Table Retrieval with Removal for Open-Domain Text-to-SQL. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5789–5806, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MURRE: Multi-Hop Table Retrieval with Removal for Open-Domain Text-to-SQL (Zhang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.386.pdf