# Schema-Aware Multi-Task Learning for Complex Text-to-SQL

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09706/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2024.

## 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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02281/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Improving Text-to-SQL Evaluation Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09029/) (2018)
- [Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12627/) (2020)
- [SmBoP: Semi-autoregressive Bottom-up Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12412/) (2020)
- [Grounded Adaptation for Zero-shot Executable Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07396/) (2020)
- [Natural SQL: Making SQL Easier to Infer from Natural Language Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05153/) (2021)
- [Learning Contextual Representations for Semantic Parsing with Generation-Augmented Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10309/) (2020)
- [Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Set Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01675/) (2020)
- [SeaD: End-to-end Text-to-SQL Generation with Schema-aware Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07911/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [EvoOntology: A Self-Evolving Ontology Layer for Data Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15779/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional text-to-SQL parsers are not good at synthesizing complex SQL queries that involve multiple tables or columns, due to the challenges inherent in identifying the correct schema items and performing accurate alignment between question and schema items. To address the above issue, we present a schema-aware multi-task learning framework (named MTSQL) for complicated SQL queries. Specifically, we design a schema linking discriminator module to distinguish the valid question-schema linkings, which explicitly instructs the encoder by distinctive linking relations to enhance the alignment quality. On the decoder side, we define 6-type relationships to describe the connections between tables and columns (e.g., WHERE_TC), and introduce an operator-centric triple extractor to recognize those associated schema items with the predefined relationship. Also, we establish a rule set of grammar constraints via the predicted triples to filter the proper SQL operators and schema items during the SQL generation. On Spider, a cross-domain challenging text-to-SQL benchmark, experimental results indicate that MTSQL is more effective than baselines, especially in extremely hard scenarios. Moreover, further analyses verify that our approach leads to promising improvements for complicated SQL queries.