Text-to-SQL systems translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries, and recent progress with large language models (LLMs) has driven substantial improvements in this task. Schema linking remains a critical component in Text-to-SQL systems, reducing prompt size for models with narrow context windows and sharpening model focus even when the entire schema fits. We present a zero-shot, training-free schema linking approach that first constructs a schema graph based on foreign key relations, then uses a single prompt to a lightweight LLM to extract source and destination tables from the user query, followed by applying classical path-finding algorithms and post-processing to identify the optimal sequence of tables and columns that should be joined, enabling the LLM to generate more accurate SQL queries. To handle real-world databases where foreign keys may be missing or inconsistent, we further propose an LLM-guided joinability discovery step that infers table connections before graph construction, ensuring robustness across diverse schemas. Despite being simple, cost-effective, and highly scalable, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the BIRD and Spider 2.0 benchmarks, outperforming previous specialized, fine-tuned, and complex multi-step LLM-based approaches.

Emotion recognition in text is crucial in natural language processing but challenging in multilingual settings due to varying cultural and linguistic cues. In this study, we assess the zero-shot capability of GPT-4o Mini, a cost-efficient small-scale LLM, for multilingual emotion detection. Since small LLMs tend to perform better with task decomposition, we introduce a two-step approach: (1) Role-Play Rewriting, where the model minimally rewrites the input sentence to reflect different emotional tones, and (2) Contrastive Judging, where the original sentence is compared against these rewrites to determine the most suitable emotion label. Our approach requires no labeled data for fine-tuning or few-shot in-context learning, enabling a plug-and-play solution that can seamlessly integrate with any LLM. Results show promising performance, particularly in low-resource languages, though with a performance gap between high- and low-resource settings. These findings highlight how task decomposition techniques like role-play and contrastive judging can enhance small LLMs’ zero-shot capabilities for real-world, data-scarce scenarios.