Anuj Chauhan


2023

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Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing
Yiqun Hu | Yiyun Zhao | Jiarong Jiang | Wuwei Lan | Henghui Zhu | Anuj Chauhan | Alexander Hanbo Li | Lin Pan | Jun Wang | Chung-Wei Hang | Sheng Zhang | Jiang Guo | Mingwen Dong | Joseph Lilien | Patrick Ng | Zhiguo Wang | Vittorio Castelli | Bing Xiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

There has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed three shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling, arbitrary table joins, and language gaps between the synthesized SQL and natural language question (NLQ) pair. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that imposes strong typing constraints, incorporates key relationships from schema, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated NLQ. When existing powerful text-to-SQL parsers are pretrained on our high-quality synthesized data, these models have significant accuracy boosts and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on Spider. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques with ablation studies