SEQ2SEQ VS SKETCH FILLING STRUCTURE FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE TO SQL TRANSLATION

Abstract. Sequence to sequence models have been widely used in the recent years in the different tasks of Natural Language processing. In particular, the concept has been deeply adopted to treat the problem of translating human language questions to SQL. In this context, many studies suggest the use of sequence to sequence approaches for predicting the target SQL queries using the different available datasets. In this paper, we put the light on another way to resolve natural language processing tasks, especially the Natural Language to SQL one using the method of sketch-based decoding which is based on a sketch with holes that the model incrementally tries to fill. We present the pros and cons of each approach and how a sketch-based model can outperform the already existing solutions in order to predict the wanted SQL queries and to generate to unseen input pairs in different contexts and cross-domain datasets, and finally we discuss the test results of the already proposed models using the exact matching scores and the errors propagation and the time required for the training as metrics.