Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which greatly facilitates the interaction between users and the database and becomes the key component in many human-computer interaction systems. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingual text-to-SQL dataset which covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese). Upon MultiSpider, we further identify the lexical and structural challenges of text-to-SQL (caused by specific language properties and dialect sayings) and their intensity across different languages. Experimental results under three typical settings (zero-shot, monolingual and multilingual) reveal a 6.1% absolute drop in accuracy in non-English languages. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to understand the reason for the performance drop of each language. Besides the dataset, we also propose a simple schema augmentation framework SAVe (Schema-Augmentation-with-Verification), which significantly boosts the overall performance by about 1.8% and closes the 29.5% performance gap across languages.
@article{arxiv.2212.13492,
title = {MultiSpider: Towards Benchmarking Multilingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing},
author = {Longxu Dou and Yan Gao and Mingyang Pan and Dingzirui Wang and Wanxiang Che and Dechen Zhan and Jian-Guang Lou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.13492},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
AAAI2023 Main Conference. Code: https://github.com/microsoft/ContextualSP