# Exploring the Compositional Generalization in Context Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04480 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04480/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (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)
- [RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04942/) (2019)
- [PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05093/) (2021)
- [Measuring Compositional Generalization: A Comprehensive Method on Realistic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09713/) (2019)
- [Compositionality decomposed: how do neural networks generalise?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08351/) (2019)
- [CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05378/) (2019)
- [Good-Enough Compositional Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09545/) (2019)
- [Compositional Generalization and Natural Language Variation: Can a Semantic Parsing Approach Handle Both?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12725/) (2020)
- [SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02285/) (2019)
- [LGESQL: Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL Model with Mixed Local and Non-Local Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01093/) (2021)
- [A comprehensive evaluation of ChatGPT's zero-shot Text-to-SQL capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13547/) (2023)
- [Data Recombination for Neural Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03622/) (2016)
- [RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06983/) (2022)
- [Span-based Semantic Parsing for Compositional Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06040/) (2020)
- [How Far are We from Effective Context Modeling? An Exploratory Study on Semantic Parsing in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00652/) (2020)
- [Improving Compositional Generalization with Latent Structure and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07610/) (2021)
- [SelfORE: Self-supervised Relational Feature Learning for Open Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02438/) (2020)
- [Semi-supervised Relation Extraction via Incremental Meta Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16410/) (2020)
- [HiURE: Hierarchical Exemplar Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02225/) (2022)
- [Disentangled Sequence to Sequence Learning for Compositional Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04655/) (2021)
- [IGSQL: Database Schema Interaction Graph Based Neural Model for Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05744/) (2020)
- [Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17004/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Poset Decoding for Compositional Generalization in Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07792/) (2020)
- [HIE-SQL: History Information Enhanced Network for Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07376/) (2022)
- [Semantic Enhanced Text-to-SQL Parsing via Iteratively Learning Schema Linking Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03903/) (2022)
- [STAR: SQL Guided Pre-Training for Context-dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11888/) (2022)
- [Tracking Interaction States for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04995/) (2020)
- [Measuring and Improving Compositional Generalization in Text-to-SQL via Component Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02054/) (2022)

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

- [Prompt Me Up: Unleashing the Power of Alignments for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16822/) (2023)
- [EHR-SeqSQL : A Sequential Text-to-SQL Dataset For Interactively Exploring Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00019/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the context-dependent Text-to-SQL task, the generated SQL statements are refined iteratively based on the user input utterance from each interaction. The input text from each interaction can be viewed as component modifications to the previous SQL statements, which could be further extracted as the modification patterns. Since these modification patterns could also be combined with other SQL statements, the models are supposed to have the compositional generalization to these novel combinations. This work is the first exploration of compositional generalization in context-dependent Text-to-SQL scenarios. To facilitate related studies, we constructed two challenging benchmarks named textscCoSQL-CG and textscSParC-CG by recombining the modification patterns and existing SQL statements. The following experiments show that all current models struggle on our proposed benchmarks. Furthermore, we found that better aligning the previous SQL statements with the input utterance could give models better compositional generalization ability. Based on these observations, we propose a method named textttp-align to improve the compositional generalization of Text-to-SQL models. Further experiments validate the effectiveness of our method. Source code and data are available.