A Heterogeneous Graph to Abstract Syntax Tree Framework for Text-to-SQL | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

A Heterogeneous Graph to Abstract Syntax Tree Framework for Text-to-SQL


Abstract:

Text-to-SQL is the task of converting a natural language utterance plus the corresponding database schema into a SQL program. The inputs naturally form a heterogeneous gr...Show More

Abstract:

Text-to-SQL is the task of converting a natural language utterance plus the corresponding database schema into a SQL program. The inputs naturally form a heterogeneous graph while the output SQL can be transduced into an abstract syntax tree (AST). Traditional encoder-decoder models ignore higher-order semantics in heterogeneous graph encoding and introduce permutation biases during AST construction, thus incapable of exploiting the refined structure knowledge precisely. In this work, we propose a generic heterogeneous graph to abstract syntax tree (HG2AST) framework to integrate dedicated structure knowledge into statistics-based models. On the encoder side, we leverage a line graph enhanced encoder (LGESQL) to iteratively update both node and edge features through dual graph message passing and aggregation. On the decoder side, a grammar-based decoder first constructs the equivalent SQL AST and then transforms it into the desired SQL via post-processing. To avoid over-fitting permutation biases, we propose a golden tree-oriented learning (GTL) algorithm to adaptively control the expanding order of AST nodes. The graph encoder and tree decoder are combined into a unified framework through two auxiliary modules. Extensive experiments on various text-to-SQL datasets, including single/multi-table, single/cross-domain, and multilingual settings, demonstrate the superiority and broad applicability.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence ( Volume: 45, Issue: 11, 01 November 2023)
Page(s): 13796 - 13813
Date of Publication: 26 July 2023

ISSN Information:

PubMed ID: 37494163

Funding Agency:


Contact IEEE to Subscribe

References

References is not available for this document.