Recent Advances in Text-to-SQL: A Survey of What We Have and What We Expect
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Text-to-SQL has attracted attention from both the natural language processing and database communities because of its ability to convert the semantics in natural language into SQL queries and its practical application in building natural language interfaces to database systems. The major challenges in text-to-SQL lie in encoding the meaning of natural utterances, decoding to SQL queries, and translating the semantics between these two forms. These challenges have been addressed to different extents by the recent advances. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive surveys for this task. To this end, we review recent progress on text-to-SQL for datasets, methods, and evaluation and provide this systematic survey, addressing the aforementioned challenges and discussing potential future directions. We hope that this survey can serve as quick access to existing work and motivate future research.
Key facts. Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 104 of its 158 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2022.
Builds on
104 of 158 references.
References · 104
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
- 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
- 2017Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networkscited by 4,861
- 2015Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Unitscited by 2,898
- 2021Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processingcited by 2,222
- 2018Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Taskcited by 1,120
- 2015Pointer Networkscited by 882
- 2015Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networkscited by 792
- 2018MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modellingcited by 760
- 2017Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learningcited by 679
38 more
- 2015Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tablescited by 509
- 2019RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parserscited by 420
- 2021PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Modelscited by 402
- 2020TaBERT: Pretraining for Joint Understanding of Textual and Tabular Datacited by 395
- 2018The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answeringcited by 235
- 2022UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Modelscited by 231
- 2019Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representationcited by 210
- 2019CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databasescited by 180
- 2020GraPPa: Grammar-Augmented Pre-Training for Table Semantic Parsingcited by 171
- 2016Language to Logical Form with Neural Attentioncited by 158
- 2020Compositional Generalization and Natural Language Variation: Can a Semantic Parsing Approach Handle Both?cited by 147
- 2019SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Contextcited by 141
- 2017SQLNet: Generating Structured Queries From Natural Language Without Reinforcement Learningcited by 135
- 2018Improving Text-to-SQL Evaluation Methodologycited by 133
- 2020Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsingcited by 133
- 2020Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-SQL with Distilled Test Suitescited by 123
- 2021LGESQL: Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL Model with Mixed Local and Non-Local Relationscited by 119
- 2018Coarse-to-Fine Decoding for Neural Semantic Parsingcited by 110
- 2021Towards Robustness of Text-to-SQL Models against Synonym Substitutioncited by 110
- 2021KaggleDBQA: Realistic Evaluation of Text-to-SQL Parserscited by 105
- 2017Learning a Neural Semantic Parser from User Feedbackcited by 98
- 2020SmBoP: Semi-autoregressive Bottom-up Semantic Parsingcited by 97
- 2017Structured Attention Networkscited by 95
- 2021Exploring Underexplored Limitations of Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Generalizationcited by 92
- 2019A Comprehensive Exploration on WikiSQL with Table-Aware Word Contextualizationcited by 88
- 2018TypeSQL: Knowledge-based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generationcited by 81
- 2019Editing-Based SQL Query Generation for Cross-Domain Context-Dependent Questionscited by 80
- 2019A Discrete Hard EM Approach for Weakly Supervised Question Answeringcited by 78
- 2019Text-to-SQL Generation for Question Answering on Electronic Medical Recordscited by 76
- 2020Grounded Adaptation for Zero-shot Executable Semantic Parsingcited by 76
- 2018SyntaxSQLNet: Syntax Tree Networks for Complex and Cross-DomainText-to-SQL Taskcited by 74
- 2019Representing Schema Structure with Graph Neural Networks for Text-to-SQL Parsingcited by 74
- 2021Natural SQL: Making SQL Easier to Infer from Natural Language Specificationscited by 66
- 2020Learning Contextual Representations for Semantic Parsing with Generation-Augmented Pre-Trainingcited by 65
- 2020RYANSQL: Recursively Applying Sketch-based Slot Fillings for Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Databasescited by 63
- 2020On the Potential of Lexico-logical Alignments for Semantic Parsing to SQL Queriescited by 59
- 2018Memory Augmented Policy Optimization for Program Synthesis and Semantic Parsingcited by 57
- 2021Unlocking Compositional Generalization in Pre-trained Models Using Intermediate Representationscited by 55
50 most cited of 104 All 104 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 6; 2024: 19; 2025: 13; 2026: 9.
47 papers.
Sort:
By area:
- 2023Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluationcited by 378
- 2023MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQLcited by 158
- 2024Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQLcited by 118
- 2024The Death of Schema Linking? Text-to-SQL in the Age of Well-Reasoned Language Modelscited by 67
- 2024A Survey of Text-to-SQL in the Era of LLMs: Where are we, and where are we going?cited by 54
- 2024FinSQL: Model-Agnostic LLMs-based Text-to-SQL Framework for Financial Analysiscited by 35
- 2023Natural Language Interfaces for Tabular Data Querying and Visualization: A Surveycited by 27
- 2025ExeSQL: Self-Taught Text-to-SQL Models with Execution-Driven Bootstrapping for SQL Dialectscited by 11
- 2024BookSQL: A Large Scale Text-to-SQL Dataset for Accounting Domaincited by 10
- 2024Auto-Cypher: Improving LLMs on Cypher generation via LLM-supervised generation-verification frameworkcited by 10
- 2023Reboost Large Language Model-based Text-to-SQL, Text-to-Python, and Text-to-Function -- with Real Applications in Traffic Domaincited by 9
- 2025ReEx-SQL: Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQLcited by 8
35 more
- 2024R3: "This is My SQL, Are You With Me?" A Consensus-Based Multi-Agent System for Text-to-SQL Taskscited by 7
- 2024ProbGate at EHRSQL 2024: Enhancing SQL Query Generation Accuracy through Probabilistic Threshold Filtering and Error Handlingcited by 6
- 2024Unmasking Database Vulnerabilities: Zero-Knowledge Schema Inference Attacks in Text-to-SQL Systemscited by 6
- 2024DAC: Decomposed Automation Correction for Text-to-SQLcited by 6
- 2024Open-SQL Framework: Enhancing Text-to-SQL on Open-source Large Language Modelscited by 5
- 2024SelECT-SQL: Self-correcting ensemble Chain-of-Thought for Text-to-SQLcited by 4
- 2025JOLT-SQL: Joint Loss Tuning of Text-to-SQL with Confusion-aware Noisy Schema Samplingcited by 4
- 2025Exploring the Landscape of Text-to-SQL with Large Language Models: Progresses, Challenges and Opportunitiescited by 4
- 2025Rethinking Schema Linking: A Context-Aware Bidirectional Retrieval Approach for Text-to-SQLcited by 4
- 2024AnnotatedTables: A Large Tabular Dataset with Language Model Annotationscited by 3
- 2024Towards Automated Data Sciences with Natural Language and SageCopilot: Practices and Lessons Learnedcited by 3
- 2025MaskSQL: Safeguarding Privacy for LLM-Based Text-to-SQL via Abstractioncited by 3
- 2025OraPlan-SQL: A Planning-Centric Framework for Complex Bilingual NL2SQL Reasoningcited by 3
- 2024DeTriever: Decoder-representation-based Retriever for Improving NL2SQL In-Context Learningcited by 2
- 2025EICopilot: Search and Explore Enterprise Information over Large-scale Knowledge Graphs with LLM-driven Agentscited by 2
- 2026Disentangling Ambiguity from Instability in Large Language Models: A Clinical Text-to-SQL Case Studycited by 2
- 2023Semantic Parsing for Complex Data Retrieval: Targeting Query Plans vs. SQL for No-Code Access to Relational Databasescited by 1
- 2024From Text to CQL: Bridging Natural Language and Corpus Search Enginecited by 1
- 2024An Actor-Critic Approach to Boosting Text-to-SQL Large Language Modelcited by 1
- 2024Talking with Tables for Better LLM Factual Data Interactionscited by 1
- 2025SQLong: Enhanced NL2SQL for Longer Contexts with LLMscited by 1
- 2025Text-to-SQL Task-oriented Dialogue Ontology Constructioncited by 1
- 2026SQLStructEval: Structural Evaluation of LLM Text-to-SQL Generationcited by 1
- 2026EXPO-SQL: Execution-based Clause-level Policy Optimization for Text-to-SQLcited by 1
- 2023Translating Natural Language Queries to SQL Using the T5 Modelcited by 0
- 2024Evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Korean Meteorological Expertscited by 0
- 2025Datrics Text2SQL: A Framework for Natural Language to SQL Query Generationcited by 0
- 2025HI-SQL: Optimizing Text-to-SQL Systems through Dynamic Hint Integrationcited by 0
- 2025GEMMA-SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Model Based on Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Cluster Workload Allocation: Semantic Soft Affinity Using Natural Language Processingcited by 0
- 2026CAPER: Clause-Aligned Process Supervision for Text-to-SQLcited by 0
- 2026ACE-SQL: Adaptive Co-Optimization via Empirical Credit Assignment for Text-to-SQLcited by 0
- 2026ZAS-SQL: Distilling Rules from Failures for Zero-Shot Text-to-SQLcited by 0
- 2026Replacing Training with Memory: Listwise Selection for Text-to-SQLcited by 0
- 2026Auditing and Repairing LLM-as-Judge Failures in a Production Text-to-SQL Pipelinecited by 0
- 2026Auditing and Repairing LLM-as-Judge Failures in a Production Text-to-SQL Pipeline9 Sep 2026
- 2026Replacing Training with Memory: Listwise Selection for Text-to-SQL1 Sep 2026
- 2026ZAS-SQL: Distilling Rules from Failures for Zero-Shot Text-to-SQL6 Jun 2026
- 2026ACE-SQL: Adaptive Co-Optimization via Empirical Credit Assignment for Text-to-SQL4 Jun 2026
- 2026CAPER: Clause-Aligned Process Supervision for Text-to-SQL2 Jun 2026
- 2026EXPO-SQL: Execution-based Clause-level Policy Optimization for Text-to-SQL29 Apr 2026
- 2026SQLStructEval: Structural Evaluation of LLM Text-to-SQL Generation8 Apr 2026
- 2026Disentangling Ambiguity from Instability in Large Language Models: A Clinical Text-to-SQL Case Study12 Feb 2026
- 2026Cluster Workload Allocation: Semantic Soft Affinity Using Natural Language Processing14 Jan 2026
- 2025GEMMA-SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Model Based on Large Language Models5 Nov 2025
- 2025OraPlan-SQL: A Planning-Centric Framework for Complex Bilingual NL2SQL Reasoning27 Oct 2025
- 2025Rethinking Schema Linking: A Context-Aware Bidirectional Retrieval Approach for Text-to-SQL16 Oct 2025
35 more
- 2025MaskSQL: Safeguarding Privacy for LLM-Based Text-to-SQL via Abstraction27 Sep 2025
- 2025Text-to-SQL Task-oriented Dialogue Ontology Construction31 Jul 2025
- 2025HI-SQL: Optimizing Text-to-SQL Systems through Dynamic Hint Integration11 Jun 2025
- 2025Exploring the Landscape of Text-to-SQL with Large Language Models: Progresses, Challenges and Opportunities28 May 2025
- 2025ExeSQL: Self-Taught Text-to-SQL Models with Execution-Driven Bootstrapping for SQL Dialects22 May 2025
- 2025JOLT-SQL: Joint Loss Tuning of Text-to-SQL with Confusion-aware Noisy Schema Sampling20 May 2025
- 2025ReEx-SQL: Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL19 May 2025
- 2025Datrics Text2SQL: A Framework for Natural Language to SQL Query Generation3 Apr 2025
- 2025SQLong: Enhanced NL2SQL for Longer Contexts with LLMs23 Feb 2025
- 2025EICopilot: Search and Explore Enterprise Information over Large-scale Knowledge Graphs with LLM-driven Agents23 Jan 2025
- 2024Talking with Tables for Better LLM Factual Data Interactions22 Dec 2024
- 2024Auto-Cypher: Improving LLMs on Cypher generation via LLM-supervised generation-verification framework17 Dec 2024
- 2024An Actor-Critic Approach to Boosting Text-to-SQL Large Language Model28 Oct 2024
- 2024Evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Korean Meteorological Experts24 Oct 2024
- 2024SelECT-SQL: Self-correcting ensemble Chain-of-Thought for Text-to-SQL16 Sep 2024
- 2024DAC: Decomposed Automation Correction for Text-to-SQL16 Aug 2024
- 2024The Death of Schema Linking? Text-to-SQL in the Age of Well-Reasoned Language Models14 Aug 2024
- 2024A Survey of Text-to-SQL in the Era of LLMs: Where are we, and where are we going?9 Aug 2024
- 2024Towards Automated Data Sciences with Natural Language and SageCopilot: Practices and Lessons Learned21 Jul 2024
- 2024AnnotatedTables: A Large Tabular Dataset with Language Model Annotations24 Jun 2024
- 2024Unmasking Database Vulnerabilities: Zero-Knowledge Schema Inference Attacks in Text-to-SQL Systems20 Jun 2024
- 2024Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL12 Jun 2024
- 2024DeTriever: Decoder-representation-based Retriever for Improving NL2SQL In-Context Learning12 Jun 2024
- 2024BookSQL: A Large Scale Text-to-SQL Dataset for Accounting Domain12 Jun 2024
- 2024Open-SQL Framework: Enhancing Text-to-SQL on Open-source Large Language Models4 May 2024
- 2024ProbGate at EHRSQL 2024: Enhancing SQL Query Generation Accuracy through Probabilistic Threshold Filtering and Error Handling25 Apr 2024
- 2024From Text to CQL: Bridging Natural Language and Corpus Search Engine21 Feb 2024
- 2024R3: "This is My SQL, Are You With Me?" A Consensus-Based Multi-Agent System for Text-to-SQL Tasks20 Feb 2024
- 2024FinSQL: Model-Agnostic LLMs-based Text-to-SQL Framework for Financial Analysis19 Jan 2024
- 2023Semantic Parsing for Complex Data Retrieval: Targeting Query Plans vs. SQL for No-Code Access to Relational Databases22 Dec 2023
- 2023MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL18 Dec 2023
- 2023Translating Natural Language Queries to SQL Using the T5 Model12 Dec 2023
- 2023Reboost Large Language Model-based Text-to-SQL, Text-to-Python, and Text-to-Function -- with Real Applications in Traffic Domain28 Oct 2023
- 2023Natural Language Interfaces for Tabular Data Querying and Visualization: A Survey27 Oct 2023
- 2023Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluation29 Aug 2023
- 2024The Death of Schema Linking? Text-to-SQL in the Age of Well-Reasoned Language Modelscited by 67
- 2025ReEx-SQL: Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQLcited by 8
- 2024SelECT-SQL: Self-correcting ensemble Chain-of-Thought for Text-to-SQLcited by 4
- 2025OraPlan-SQL: A Planning-Centric Framework for Complex Bilingual NL2SQL Reasoningcited by 3
- 2025OraPlan-SQL: A Planning-Centric Framework for Complex Bilingual NL2SQL Reasoning27 Oct 2025
- 2025ReEx-SQL: Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL19 May 2025
- 2024SelECT-SQL: Self-correcting ensemble Chain-of-Thought for Text-to-SQL16 Sep 2024
- 2024The Death of Schema Linking? Text-to-SQL in the Age of Well-Reasoned Language Models14 Aug 2024
- 2023MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQLcited by 158
- 2024R3: "This is My SQL, Are You With Me?" A Consensus-Based Multi-Agent System for Text-to-SQL Taskscited by 7
- 2025EICopilot: Search and Explore Enterprise Information over Large-scale Knowledge Graphs with LLM-driven Agentscited by 2
- 2025EICopilot: Search and Explore Enterprise Information over Large-scale Knowledge Graphs with LLM-driven Agents23 Jan 2025
- 2024R3: "This is My SQL, Are You With Me?" A Consensus-Based Multi-Agent System for Text-to-SQL Tasks20 Feb 2024
- 2023MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL18 Dec 2023
- 2023Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluationcited by 378
- 2024Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQLcited by 118
- 2024A Survey of Text-to-SQL in the Era of LLMs: Where are we, and where are we going?cited by 54
- 2024FinSQL: Model-Agnostic LLMs-based Text-to-SQL Framework for Financial Analysiscited by 35
- 2023Natural Language Interfaces for Tabular Data Querying and Visualization: A Surveycited by 27
- 2024BookSQL: A Large Scale Text-to-SQL Dataset for Accounting Domaincited by 10
- 2024Auto-Cypher: Improving LLMs on Cypher generation via LLM-supervised generation-verification frameworkcited by 10
- 2023Reboost Large Language Model-based Text-to-SQL, Text-to-Python, and Text-to-Function -- with Real Applications in Traffic Domaincited by 9
- 2024ProbGate at EHRSQL 2024: Enhancing SQL Query Generation Accuracy through Probabilistic Threshold Filtering and Error Handlingcited by 6
- 2024Unmasking Database Vulnerabilities: Zero-Knowledge Schema Inference Attacks in Text-to-SQL Systemscited by 6
- 2024DAC: Decomposed Automation Correction for Text-to-SQLcited by 6
- 2024Open-SQL Framework: Enhancing Text-to-SQL on Open-source Large Language Modelscited by 5
12 most cited of 38 All 38 (JSON)
- 2026Auditing and Repairing LLM-as-Judge Failures in a Production Text-to-SQL Pipeline9 Sep 2026
- 2026Replacing Training with Memory: Listwise Selection for Text-to-SQL1 Sep 2026
- 2026ZAS-SQL: Distilling Rules from Failures for Zero-Shot Text-to-SQL6 Jun 2026
- 2026ACE-SQL: Adaptive Co-Optimization via Empirical Credit Assignment for Text-to-SQL4 Jun 2026
- 2026EXPO-SQL: Execution-based Clause-level Policy Optimization for Text-to-SQL29 Apr 2026
- 2026SQLStructEval: Structural Evaluation of LLM Text-to-SQL Generation8 Apr 2026
- 2026Disentangling Ambiguity from Instability in Large Language Models: A Clinical Text-to-SQL Case Study12 Feb 2026
- 2026Cluster Workload Allocation: Semantic Soft Affinity Using Natural Language Processing14 Jan 2026
- 2025GEMMA-SQL: A Novel Text-to-SQL Model Based on Large Language Models5 Nov 2025
- 2025Rethinking Schema Linking: A Context-Aware Bidirectional Retrieval Approach for Text-to-SQL16 Oct 2025
- 2025MaskSQL: Safeguarding Privacy for LLM-Based Text-to-SQL via Abstraction27 Sep 2025
- 2025Text-to-SQL Task-oriented Dialogue Ontology Construction31 Jul 2025
12 newest of 38 All 38 (JSON)