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Zero-Shot Text-to-SQL Learning with Auxiliary Task (arxiv.org)
3 points by sel1 on Aug 31, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A system that turns plain-English questions into database queries is trained with an extra side task that keeps it from just memorizing the examples it sees. It beat a strong baseline by over 3% overall and 5% on rarely seen questions.

Abstract · Zero-shot Text-to-SQL Learning with Auxiliary Task

Recent years have seen great success in the use of neural seq2seq models on the text-to-SQL task. However, little work has paid attention to how these models generalize to realistic unseen data, which naturally raises a question: does this impressive performance signify a perfect generalization model, or are there still some limitations? In this paper, we first diagnose the bottleneck of text-to-SQL task by providing a new testbed, in which we observe that existing models present poor generalization ability on rarely-seen data. The above analysis encourages us to design a simple but effective auxiliary task, which serves as a supportive model as well as a regularization term to the generation task to increase the models generalization. Experimentally, We evaluate our models on a large text-to-SQL dataset WikiSQL. Compared to a strong baseline coarse-to-fine model, our models improve over the baseline by more than 3% absolute in accuracy on the whole dataset. More interestingly, on a zero-shot subset test of WikiSQL, our models achieve 5% absolute accuracy gain over the baseline, clearly demonstrating its superior generalizability.

Shuaichen Chang, Pengfei Liu, Yun Tang, Jing Huang, Xiaodong He, Bowen Zhou
arXiv:1908.11052 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Aug 29, 2019
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