With the top-ranked PTM candidates, we further learn to enrich task repr.

With the top-ranked PTM candidates, we further learn to enrich task repr.

The selection of the step-size is of great importance in both the theoretical and practical performance of first-order methods, including the aforementioned VR methods.

Natural Language Interfaces for Databases empower non-technical users to interact with data using natural language (NL). Advanced approaches, utilizing either neural sequence-to-sequence or more recent sophisticated large-scale language models, typically implement NL to SQL (NL2SQL) translation in an end-to-end fashion. However, like humans, these end-to-end translation models may not always generate the best SQL output on their first try. In this paper, we propose CycleSQL, an iterative framework designed for end-to-end translation models to autonomously generate the best output through self-evaluation. The main idea of CycleSQL is to introduce data-grounded NL explanations of query results as self-provided feedback, and use the feedback to validate the correctness of the translation iteratively, hence improving the overall translation accuracy. Extensive experiments, including quantitative and qualitative evaluations, are conducted to study CycleSQL by applying it to seven existing translation models on five widely used benchmarks. The results show that 1) the feedback loop introduced in CycleSQL can consistently improve the performance of existing models, and in particular, by applying CycleSQL to RESDSQL, obtains a translation accuracy of 82.0% (+2.6%) on the validation set, and 81.6% (+3.2%) on the test set of Spider benchmark; 2) the generated NL explanations can also provide insightful information for users, aiding in the comprehension of translation results and consequently enhancing the interpretability of NL2SQL translation.

We focus on Text-to-SQL semantic parsing from the perspective of Large Language Models. Motivated by challenges related to the size of commercial database schemata and the deployability of business intelligence solutions, we propose an approach that dynamically retrieves input database information and uses abstract syntax trees to select few-shot examples for in-context learning. Furthermore, we investigate the extent to which an in-parallel semantic parser can be leveraged for generating $\textit{approximated}$ versions of the expected SQL queries, to support our retrieval. We take this approach to the extreme--we adapt a model consisting of less than $500$M parameters, to act as an extremely efficient approximator, enhancing it with the ability to process schemata in a parallelised manner. We apply our approach to monolingual and cross-lingual benchmarks for semantic parsing, showing improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. Comprehensive experiments highlight the contribution of modules involved in this retrieval-augmented generation setting, revealing interesting directions for future work.

Figuring out which Pre-Trained Model (PTM) from a model zoo fits the target task is essential to take advantage of plentiful model resources. With the availability of numerous heterogeneous PTMs from diverse fields, efficiently selecting the most suitable PTM is challenging due to the time-consuming costs of carrying out forward or backward passes over all PTMs. In this paper, we propose Model Spider, which tokenizes both PTMs and tasks by summarizing their characteristics into vectors to enable efficient PTM selection. By leveraging the approximated performance of PTMs on a separate set of training tasks, Model Spider learns to construct tokens and measure the fitness score between a model-task pair via their tokens. The ability to rank relevant PTMs higher than others generalizes to new tasks. With the top-ranked PTM candidates, we further learn to enrich task tokens with their PTM-specific semantics to re-rank the PTMs for better selection. Model Spider balances efficiency and selection ability, making PTM selection like a spider preying on a web. Model Spider demonstrates promising performance in various configurations of model zoos.

In order to reliably process natural language, NLP systems must generalize to the long tail of rare utterances. We propose a method to create challenging benchmarks that require generalizing to the tail of the distribution by re-splitting existing datasets. We create 'Likelihood Splits' where examples that are assigned lower likelihood by a pre-trained language model (LM) are placed in the test set, and more likely examples are in the training set. This simple approach can be customized to construct meaningful train-test splits for a wide range of tasks. Likelihood Splits surface more challenges than random splits: relative error rates of state-of-the-art models increase by 59% for semantic parsing on Spider, 93% for natural language inference on SNLI, and 33% for yes/no question answering on BoolQ, on our splits compared with the corresponding random splits. Moreover, Likelihood Splits create fairer benchmarks than adversarial filtering; when the LM used to create the splits is also employed as the task model, our splits do not unfairly penalize the LM.

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which greatly facilitates the interaction between users and the database and becomes the key component in many human-computer interaction systems. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingual text-to-SQL dataset which covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese). Upon MultiSpider, we further identify the lexical and structural challenges of text-to-SQL (caused by specific language properties and dialect sayings) and their intensity across different languages. Experimental results under three typical settings (zero-shot, monolingual and multilingual) reveal a 6.1% absolute drop in accuracy in non-English languages. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to understand the reason for the performance drop of each language. Besides the dataset, we also propose a simple schema augmentation framework SAVe (Schema-Augmentation-with-Verification), which significantly boosts the overall performance by about 1.8% and closes the 29.5% performance gap across languages.