Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing

Abstract

We present BRIDGE, a powerful sequential architecture for modeling dependencies between natural language questions and relational databases in cross-DB semantic parsing. BRIDGE represents the question and DB schema in a tagged sequence where a subset of the fields are augmented with cell values mentioned in the question. The hybrid sequence is encoded by BERT with minimal subsequent layers and the text-DB contextualization is realized via the fine-tuned deep attention in BERT. Combined with a pointergenerator decoder with schema-consistency driven search space pruning, BRIDGE attained state-of-the-art performance on the well-studied Spider benchmark (65.5% dev, 59.2% test), despite being much simpler than most recently proposed models for this task. Our analysis shows that BRIDGE effectively captures the desired cross-modal dependencies and has the potential to generalize to more text-DB related tasks.