SyntaxSQLNet: Syntax Tree Networks for Complex and Cross-DomainText-to-SQL Task

10/11/2018

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by   Tao Yu, et al.

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Yale University

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Most existing studies in text-to-SQL tasks do not require generating complex SQL queries with multiple clauses or sub-queries, and generalizing to new, unseen databases. In this paper we propose SyntaxSQLNet, a syntax tree network to address the complex and cross-domain text-to-SQL generation task. SyntaxSQLNet employs a SQL specific syntax tree-based decoder with SQL generation path history and table-aware column attention encoders. We evaluate SyntaxSQLNet on the Spider text-to-SQL task, which contains databases with multiple tables and complex SQL queries with multiple SQL clauses and nested queries. We use a database split setting where databases in the test set are unseen during training. Experimental results show that SyntaxSQLNet can handle a significantly greater number of complex SQL examples than prior work, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model by 8.3 accuracy. We also show that SyntaxSQLNet can further improve the performance by an additional 8.1 16.4 complex and cross-domain text-to-SQL task.