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Importance of Synthesizing High-Quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Dec 20, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They built a way to generate practice question-and-SQL pairs that follows the database's real table links, strict data types, and picks related columns instead of random ones. Pretrained on this cleaner synthetic data, existing parsers gained accuracy, setting a new best on Spider.

Abstract · Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing

Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first 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 two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, 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 natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.

Yiyun Zhao, Jiarong Jiang, Yiqun Hu, Wuwei Lan, Henry Zhu, Anuj Chauhan, Alexander Li, Lin Pan, Jun Wang, Chung-Wei Hang, Sheng Zhang, Marvin Dong, et al.
arXiv:2212.08785 · cs.CL · submitted Dec 17, 2022
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