Dialect2SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Dataset for Arabic Dialects with a Focus on Moroccan Darija

Salmane Chafik, Saad Ezzini, Ismail Berrada


Abstract
The task of converting natural language questions into executable SQL queries, known as text-to-SQL, has gained significant interest in recent years, as it enables non-technical users to interact with relational databases. Many benchmarks, such as SPIDER and WikiSQL, have contributed to the development of new models and the evaluation of their performance. In addition, other datasets, like SEDE and BIRD, have introduced more challenges and complexities to better map real-world scenarios. However, these datasets primarily focus on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. In this work, we introduce Dialect2SQL, the first large-scale, cross-domain text-to-SQL dataset in an Arabic dialect. It consists of 9,428 NLQ-SQL pairs across 69 databases in various domains. Along with SQL-related challenges such as long schemas, dirty values, and complex queries, our dataset also incorporates the complexities of the Moroccan dialect, which is known for its diverse source lan-guages, numerous borrowed words, and unique expressions. This demonstrates that our dataset will be a valuable contribution to both the text-to-SQL community and the development of resources for low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.wacl-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Saad Ezzini, Hamza Alami, Ismail Berrada, Abdessamad Benlahbib, Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Salima Lamsiyah, Hatim Derrouz, Amal Haddad Haddad, Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Ruslan Mitkov, Paul Rayson
Venues:
WACL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
86–92
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.wacl-1.10/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Salmane Chafik, Saad Ezzini, and Ismail Berrada. 2025. Dialect2SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Dataset for Arabic Dialects with a Focus on Moroccan Darija. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Arabic Corpus Linguistics (WACL-4), pages 86–92, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dialect2SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Dataset for Arabic Dialects with a Focus on Moroccan Darija (Chafik et al., WACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.wacl-1.10.pdf