# A Comprehensive Exploration on WikiSQL with Table-Aware Word Contextualization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 88 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 88)

- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
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- [CHASE-SQL: Multi-Path Reasoning and Preference Optimized Candidate Selection in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01943/) (2024)
- [Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08762/) (2021)
- [RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06983/) (2022)
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- [Don't Generate, Discriminate: A Proposal for Grounding Language Models to Real-World Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09736/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Text-to-SQL Parsing: Concepts, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13629/) (2022)
- [ArcaneQA: Dynamic Program Induction and Contextualized Encoding for Knowledge Base Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08109/) (2022)
- [Recent Advances in Text-to-SQL: A Survey of What We Have and What We Expect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10099/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12424/) (2024)
- [Middleware for LLMs: Tools Are Instrumental for Language Agents in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14672/) (2024)
- [Data Augmentation with Hierarchical SQL-to-Question Generation for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02227/) (2021)
- [SQLBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation for Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02951/) (2024)
- [Awakening Latent Grounding from Pretrained Language Models for Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10540/) (2021)
- [Towards Robustness of Text-to-SQL Models Against Natural and Realistic Adversarial Table Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09994/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Knowledge Base Question Answering: A Semantic Parsing Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04994/) (2022)
- [MAG-SQL: Multi-Agent Generative Approach with Soft Schema Linking and Iterative Sub-SQL Refinement for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07930/) (2024)
- [Representations for Question Answering from Documents with Tables and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10573/) (2021)
- [UniSAr: A Unified Structure-Aware Autoregressive Language Model for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07781/) (2022)
- [Interactive Text-to-SQL Generation via Editable Step-by-Step Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07372/) (2023)
- [STaR-SQL: Self-Taught Reasoner for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13550/) (2025)
- [Uni-Parser: Unified Semantic Parser for Question Answering on Knowledge Base and Database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05165/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present SQLova, the first Natural-language-to-SQL (NL2SQL) model to achieve human performance in WikiSQL dataset. We revisit and discuss diverse popular methods in NL2SQL literature, take a full advantage of BERT {Devlin et al., 2018) through an effective table contextualization method, and coherently combine them, outperforming the previous state of the art by 8.2% and 2.5% in logical form and execution accuracy, respectively. We particularly note that BERT with a seq2seq decoder leads to a poor performance in the task, indicating the importance of a careful design when using such large pretrained models. We also provide a comprehensive analysis on the dataset and our model, which can be helpful for designing future NL2SQL datsets and models. We especially show that our model's performance is near the upper bound in WikiSQL, where we observe that a large portion of the evaluation errors are due to wrong annotations, and our model is already exceeding human performance by 1.3% in execution accuracy.