Embedding Individual Table Columns for Resilient SQL Chatbots

Bojan Petrovski, Ignacio Aguado, Andreea Hossmann, Michael Baeriswyl, Claudiu Musat


Abstract
Most of the world’s data is stored in relational databases. Accessing these requires specialized knowledge of the Structured Query Language (SQL), putting them out of the reach of many people. A recent research thread in Natural Language Processing (NLP) aims to alleviate this problem by automatically translating natural language questions into SQL queries. While the proposed solutions are a great start, they lack robustness and do not easily generalize: the methods require high quality descriptions of the database table columns, and the most widely used training dataset, WikiSQL, is heavily biased towards using those descriptions as part of the questions. In this work, we propose solutions to both problems: we entirely eliminate the need for column descriptions, by relying solely on their contents, and we augment the WikiSQL dataset by paraphrasing column names to reduce bias. We show that the accuracy of existing methods drops when trained on our augmented, column-agnostic dataset, and that our own method reaches state of the art accuracy, while relying on column contents only.
Anthology ID:
W18-5710
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SCAI: The 2nd International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Aleksandr Chuklin, Jeff Dalton, Julia Kiseleva, Alexey Borisov, Mikhail Burtsev
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
67–73
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5710
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5710
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bojan Petrovski, Ignacio Aguado, Andreea Hossmann, Michael Baeriswyl, and Claudiu Musat. 2018. Embedding Individual Table Columns for Resilient SQL Chatbots. In Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SCAI: The 2nd International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI, pages 67–73, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Embedding Individual Table Columns for Resilient SQL Chatbots (Petrovski et al., EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5710.pdf
Data
WikiSQL