Improving Text-to-SQL with a Hybrid Decoding Method

Abstract

Text-to-SQL is a task that converts natural language questions into SQL queries. Recent text-to-SQL models employ two decoding methods: sketch-based and generation-based, but each has its own shortcomings. The sketch-based method has limitations in performance as it does not reflect the relevance between SQL elements, while the generation-based method may increase inference time and cause syntactic errors. Therefore, we propose a novel decoding method, Hybrid decoder, which combines both methods. This reflects inter-SQL element information and defines elements that can be generated, enabling the generation of syntactically accurate SQL queries. Additionally, we introduce a Value prediction module for predicting values in the WHERE clause. It simplifies the decoding process and reduces the size of vocabulary by predicting values at once, regardless of the number of conditions. The results of evaluating the significance of Hybrid decoder indicate that it improves performance by effectively incorporating mutual information among SQL elements, compared to the sketch-based method. It also efficiently generates SQL queries by simplifying the decoding process in the generation-based method. In addition, we design a new evaluation measure to evaluate if it generates syntactically correct SQL queries. The result demonstrates that the proposed model generates syntactically accurate SQL queries.