# SPARQLing Database Queries from Intermediate Question Decompositions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06162/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08887/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03134/) (2015)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02349/) (2020)
- [RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04942/) (2019)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08314/) (2020)
- [ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14373/) (2020)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08205/) (2019)
- [GraPPa: Grammar-Augmented Pre-Training for Table Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13845/) (2020)
- [Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12627/) (2020)
- [Break It Down: A Question Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11770/) (2020)
- [Structure-Grounded Pretraining for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12773/) (2020)
- [Learning a Neural Semantic Parser from User Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08760/) (2017)
- [SmBoP: Semi-autoregressive Bottom-up Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12412/) (2020)
- [Editing-Based SQL Query Generation for Cross-Domain Context-Dependent Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00786/) (2019)
- [A Discrete Hard EM Approach for Weakly Supervised Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04849/) (2019)
- [Grounded Adaptation for Zero-shot Executable Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07396/) (2020)
- [Representing Schema Structure with Graph Neural Networks for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06241/) (2019)
- [Learning Contextual Representations for Semantic Parsing with Generation-Augmented Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10309/) (2020)
- [Memory Augmented Policy Optimization for Program Synthesis and Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02322/) (2018)
- [Global Reasoning over Database Structures for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11214/) (2019)
- [Learning to Generalize from Sparse and Underspecified Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07198/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Recent Advances in Text-to-SQL: A Survey of What We Have and What We Expect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10099/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Text-to-SQL Parsing through Question Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06311/) (2021)
- [Semantic Decomposition of Question and SQL for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13575/) (2023)
- [Disambiguate First, Parse Later: Generating Interpretations for Ambiguity Resolution in Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18448/) (2025)
- [Learning to Transpile AMR into SPARQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07877/) (2021)
- [NeuroQL: A Neuro-Symbolic Language and Dataset for Inter-Subjective Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07146/) (2023)
- [Searching for Better Database Queries in the Outputs of Semantic Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07201/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To translate natural language questions into executable database queries, most approaches rely on a fully annotated training set. Annotating a large dataset with queries is difficult as it requires query-language expertise. We reduce this burden using grounded in databases intermediate question representations. These representations are simpler to collect and were originally crowdsourced within the Break dataset (Wolfson et al., 2020). Our pipeline consists of two parts: a neural semantic parser that converts natural language questions into the intermediate representations and a non-trainable transpiler to the SPARQL query language (a standard language for accessing knowledge graphs and semantic web). We chose SPARQL because its queries are structurally closer to our intermediate representations (compared to SQL). We observe that the execution accuracy of queries constructed by our model on the challenging Spider dataset is comparable with the state-of-the-art text-to-SQL methods trained with annotated SQL queries. Our code and data are publicly available (see https://github.com/yandex-research/sparqling-queries).