# ColloQL: Robust Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Over Search Queries

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09927 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09927/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Know What I don't Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unanswerable Questions for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08902/) (2022)
- [Improving Generalization in Semantic Parsing by Increasing Natural Language Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08666/) (2024)
- [Automatic Logical Forms improve fidelity in Table-to-Text generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17279/) (2023)
- [SCARE: A Benchmark for SQL Correction and Question Answerability Classification for Reliable EHR Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17559/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Translating natural language utterances to executable queries is a helpful technique in making the vast amount of data stored in relational databases accessible to a wider range of non-tech-savvy end users. Prior work in this area has largely focused on textual input that is linguistically correct and semantically unambiguous. However, real-world user queries are often succinct, colloquial, and noisy, resembling the input of a search engine. In this work, we introduce data augmentation techniques and a sampling-based content-aware BERT model (ColloQL) to achieve robust text-to-SQL modeling over natural language search (NLS) questions. Due to the lack of evaluation data, we curate a new dataset of NLS questions and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. ColloQL's superior performance extends to well-formed text, achieving 84.9% (logical) and 90.7% (execution) accuracy on the WikiSQL dataset, making it, to the best of our knowledge, the highest performing model that does not use execution guided decoding.