# SQLNet: Generating Structured Queries From Natural Language Without Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.04436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04436/

## Key facts

- Cited by 135 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 135)

- [Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03111/) (2023)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
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- [MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11242/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17944/) (2024)
- [Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08426/) (2024)
- [LGESQL: Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL Model with Mixed Local and Non-Local Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01093/) (2021)
- [Graphix-T5: Mixing Pre-Trained Transformers with Graph-Aware Layers for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07507/) (2023)
- [RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06983/) (2022)
- [Table-GPT: Table-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09263/) (2023)
- [Natural SQL: Making SQL Easier to Infer from Natural Language Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05153/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Employing Large Language Models for Text-to-SQL Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15186/) (2024)
- [ACT-SQL: In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Automatically-Generated Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17342/) (2023)
- [Unifying the Perspectives of NLP and Software Engineering: A Survey on Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07989/) (2023)
- [Reasoning-SQL: Reinforcement Learning with SQL Tailored Partial Rewards for Reasoning-Enhanced Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23157/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Text-to-SQL in the Era of LLMs: Where are we, and where are we going?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05109/) (2024)
- [OpenSearch-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Dynamic Few-shot and Consistency Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14913/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Text-to-SQL Parsing: Concepts, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13629/) (2022)
- [Recent Advances in Text-to-SQL: A Survey of What We Have and What We Expect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10099/) (2022)
- [Skill-Based Few-Shot Selection for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14210/) (2023)
- [ScienceBenchmark: A Complex Real-World Benchmark for Evaluating Natural Language to SQL Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04743/) (2023)
- [SADGA: Structure-Aware Dual Graph Aggregation Network for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00653/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Table Question Answering: Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05270/) (2022)
- [E-SQL: Direct Schema Linking via Question Enrichment in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16751/) (2024)
- [SQLBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation for Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02951/) (2024)
- [SeaD: End-to-end Text-to-SQL Generation with Schema-aware Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07911/) (2021)
- [Natural Language Interfaces for Tabular Data Querying and Visualization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17894/) (2023)
- [PET-SQL: A Prompt-Enhanced Two-Round Refinement of Text-to-SQL with Cross-consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09732/) (2024)
- [Improving Text-to-SQL with Schema Dependency Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04399/) (2021)
- [Dual Reader-Parser on Hybrid Textual and Tabular Evidence for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02866/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthesizing SQL queries from natural language is a long-standing open problem and has been attracting considerable interest recently. Toward solving the problem, the de facto approach is to employ a sequence-to-sequence-style model. Such an approach will necessarily require the SQL queries to be serialized. Since the same SQL query may have multiple equivalent serializations, training a sequence-to-sequence-style model is sensitive to the choice from one of them. This phenomenon is documented as the "order-matters" problem. Existing state-of-the-art approaches rely on reinforcement learning to reward the decoder when it generates any of the equivalent serializations. However, we observe that the improvement from reinforcement learning is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, i.e., SQLNet, to fundamentally solve this problem by avoiding the sequence-to-sequence structure when the order does not matter. In particular, we employ a sketch-based approach where the sketch contains a dependency graph so that one prediction can be done by taking into consideration only the previous predictions that it depends on. In addition, we propose a sequence-to-set model as well as the column attention mechanism to synthesize the query based on the sketch. By combining all these novel techniques, we show that SQLNet can outperform the prior art by 9% to 13% on the WikiSQL task.