English

Multi-Turn Interactions for Text-to-SQL with Large Language Models

Computation and Language 2025-11-14 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This study explores text-to-SQL parsing by leveraging the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Despite recent advancements, existing LLM-based methods are still inefficient and struggle to handle cases with wide tables effectively. Furthermore, current interaction-based approaches either lack a step-by-step, interpretable SQL generation process or fail to provide a universally applicable interaction design. To address these challenges, we introduce Interactive-T2S, a framework that generates SQL queries through direct interactions with databases. This framework includes four general tools that facilitate proactive and efficient information retrieval by the LLM. Additionally, we have developed detailed exemplars to demonstrate the step-wise reasoning processes within our framework. Our approach achieves advanced performance on the Spider and BIRD datasets as well as their variants. Notably, we obtain state-of-the-art results on the BIRD leaderboard under the setting without oracle knowledge, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.11062,
  title  = {Multi-Turn Interactions for Text-to-SQL with Large Language Models},
  author = {Guanming Xiong and Junwei Bao and Hongfei Jiang and Yang Song and Wen Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.11062},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This work has been accepted to CIKM 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:18:31.752Z