The open-domain text-to-SQL task aims to retrieve question-relevant tables from massive databases and generate SQL. However, the performance of current methods is constrained by single-hop retrieval, and existing multi-hop retrieval of open-domain question answering is not directly applicable due to the tendency to retrieve tables similar to the retrieved ones but irrelevant to the question. Since the questions in text-to-SQL usually contain all required information, while previous multi-hop retrieval supplements the questions with retrieved documents. Therefore, we propose the multi-hop table retrieval with removal (MURRE), which removes previously retrieved information from the question to guide the retriever towards unretrieved relevant tables. Our experiments on two open-domain text-to-SQL datasets demonstrate an average improvement of 5.7% over the previous state-of-the-art results.
@article{arxiv.2402.10666,
title = {MURRE: Multi-Hop Table Retrieval with Removal for Open-Domain Text-to-SQL},
author = {Xuanliang Zhang and Dingzirui Wang and Longxu Dou and Qingfu Zhu and Wanxiang Che},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.10666},
year = {2024}
}