# SPSQL: Step-by-step Parsing Based Framework for Text-to-SQL Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11061 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11061/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03134/) (2015)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Language Representation with Informative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07129/) (2019)
- [MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02984/) (2020)
- [RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04942/) (2019)
- [Generalized End-to-End Loss for Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10467/) (2017)
- [FastBERT: a Self-distilling BERT with Adaptive Inference Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02178/) (2020)
- [Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08205/) (2019)
- [Language to Logical Form with Neural Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.01280/) (2016)
- [SQLNet: Generating Structured Queries From Natural Language Without Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04436/) (2017)
- [IGSQL: Database Schema Interaction Graph Based Neural Model for Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05744/) (2020)
- [Bridging the Semantic Gap with SQL Query Logs in Natural Language Interfaces to Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00031/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Schema-R1: A reasoning training approach for schema linking in Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11986/) (2025)
- [LR-SQL: A Supervised Fine-Tuning Method for Text2SQL Tasks under Low-Resource Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11457/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Converting text into the structured query language (Text2SQL) is a research hotspot in the field of natural language processing (NLP), which has broad application prospects. In the era of big data, the use of databases has penetrated all walks of life, in which the collected data is large in scale, diverse in variety, and wide in scope, making the data query cumbersome and inefficient, and putting forward higher requirements for the Text2SQL model. In practical applications, the current mainstream end-to-end Text2SQL model is not only difficult to build due to its complex structure and high requirements for training data, but also difficult to adjust due to massive parameters. In addition, the accuracy of the model is hard to achieve the desired result. Based on this, this paper proposes a pipelined Text2SQL method: SPSQL. This method disassembles the Text2SQL task into four subtasks--table selection, column selection, SQL generation, and value filling, which can be converted into a text classification problem, a sequence labeling problem, and two text generation problems, respectively. Then, we construct data formats of different subtasks based on existing data and improve the accuracy of the overall model by improving the accuracy of each submodel. We also use the named entity recognition module and data augmentation to optimize the overall model. We construct the dataset based on the marketing business data of the State Grid Corporation of China. Experiments demonstrate our proposed method achieves the best performance compared with the end-to-end method and other pipeline methods.