Transforming natural language questions into SQL queries is crucial for precise data retrieval from electronic health record (EHR) databases. A significant challenge in this process is detecting and rejecting unanswerable questions that request information outside the database’s scope or exceed the system’s capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel text-to-SQL framework that focuses on standardizing the structure of questions into a templated format. Our framework begins by fine-tuning GPT-3.5-turbo, a powerful large language model (LLM), with detailed prompts involving the table schemas of the EHR database system. Our approach shows promising results on the EHRSQL-2024 benchmark dataset, part of the ClinicalNLP shared task. Although fine-tuning GPT achieves third place on the development set, it struggled with the diverse questions in the test set. With our framework, we improve our system’s adaptability and achieve fourth position in the official leaderboard of the EHRSQL-2024 challenge.

As the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) expand, it becomes increasingly important to evaluate them beyond basic knowledge assessment, focusing on higher-level language understanding. This study introduces MultiPragEval, the first multilingual pragmatic evaluation of LLMs, designed for English, German, Korean, and Chinese. Comprising 1200 question units categorized according to Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its four conversational maxims, MultiPragEval enables an in-depth assessment of LLMs’ contextual awareness and their ability to infer implied meanings. Our findings demonstrate that Claude3-Opus significantly outperforms other models in all tested languages, establishing a state-of-the-art in the field. Among open-source models, Solar-10.7B and Qwen1.5-14B emerge as strong competitors. By analyzing pragmatic inference, we provide valuable insights into the capabilities essential for advanced language comprehension in AI systems.