# BIRDTurk: Adaptation of the BIRD Text-to-SQL Dataset to Turkish

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03633/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03111/) (2023)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
- [How Good is Your Tokenizer? On the Monolingual Performance of Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15613/) (2020)
- [Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07763/) (2024)
- [Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13707/) (2023)
- [Improving Text-to-SQL Evaluation Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09029/) (2018)
- [Impact of Tokenization on Language Models: An Analysis for Turkish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08832/) (2022)
- [A Pilot Study of Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing for Vietnamese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01891/) (2020)
- [A Pilot Study for Chinese SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13293/) (2019)
- [MultiSpider: Towards Benchmarking Multilingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13492/) (2022)
- [Evaluating the Quality of Benchmark Datasets for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study on Turkish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09714/) (2025)
- [Ar-Spider: Text-to-SQL in Arabic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15012/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-SQL systems have achieved strong performance on English benchmarks, yet their behavior in morphologically rich, low-resource languages remains largely unexplored. We introduce BIRDTurk, the first Turkish adaptation of the BIRD benchmark, constructed through a controlled translation pipeline that adapts schema identifiers to Turkish while strictly preserving the logical structure and execution semantics of SQL queries and databases. Translation quality is validated on a sample size determined by the Central Limit Theorem to ensure 95% confidence, achieving 98.15% accuracy on human-evaluated samples. Using BIRDTurk, we evaluate inference-based prompting, agentic multi-stage reasoning, and supervised fine-tuning. Our results reveal that Turkish introduces consistent performance degradation, driven by both structural linguistic divergence and underrepresentation in LLM pretraining, while agentic reasoning demonstrates stronger cross-lingual robustness. Supervised fine-tuning remains challenging for standard multilingual baselines but scales effectively with modern instruction-tuned models. BIRDTurk provides a controlled testbed for cross-lingual Text-to-SQL evaluation under realistic database conditions. We release the training and development splits to support future research.