Korea, Republic of

Text-to-SQL has attracted attention from both the natural language processing and database communities because of its ability to convert the semantics in natural language into SQL queries and its practical application in building natural language interfaces to database systems. The major challenges in text-to-SQL lie in encoding the meaning of natural utterances, decoding to SQL queries, and translating the semantics between these two forms. These challenges have been addressed to different extents by the recent advances. How- ever, there is still a lack of comprehensive surveys for this task. To this end, we review recent progress on text-to-SQL for datasets, methods, and evaluation and provide this systematic survey, addressing the aforementioned challenges and discussing potential future directions. We hope that this survey can serve as quick access to existing work and motivate future research.

COLING 2022

Recent Advances in Text-to-SQL: A Survey of What We Have and What We Expect

nlidb

text-to-sql

semantic parsing

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

technical paper

Pre-trained models have brought remarkable success on the text summarization task. For dialogue summarization, the subdomain of text summarization, utterances are concatenated to flat text before being processed. As a result, existing summarization systems based on pre-trained models are unable to recognize the unique format of the speaker-utterance pair well in the dialogue. To investigate this issue, we conduct probing tests and manual analysis, and find that the powerful pre-trained model can not identify different speakers well in the conversation, which leads to various factual errors. Moreover, we propose three speaker-aware supervised contrastive learning (SCL) tasks: Token-level SCL, Turn-level SCL, and Global-level SCL. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve significant performance improvement on two mainstream dialogue summarization datasets. According to detailed human evaluations, pre-trained models equipped with SCL tasks effectively generate summaries with better factual consistency.

Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Speaker-Aware Supervised Contrastive Learning

Abstractive dialogue summarization aims to convert a long dialogue content into its short form where the salient information is preserved, while the redundant pieces are ignored. Different from the well-structured text, such as news and scientific articles, dialogues often consist of utterances coming from two or more interlocutors, where the conversations are often informal, verbose, and repetitive, sprinkled with false-starts, backchanneling, reconfirmations, hesitations, speaker interruptions and the salient information is often scattered across the whole chat. The above properties of conversations make it difficult to directly concentrate on scattered outstanding utterances and thus present new challenges of summarizing dialogues. In this work, we propose to explicitly have the model perceive the redundant parts of an input dialogue history, so that the model is able to pay more attention to the salient pieces. To be specific, we design two strategies to construct examples without salient pieces as negative cues. Then, the sequence-to-sequence likelihood loss is cooperated with the unlikelihood objective to drive the model focus less on the unimportant information as well as pay more attention to the salient pieces. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our simple method outperforms baselines with regard to both semantic matching and factual consistent based metrics. The human evaluation also proves the performance gains led by our approach.

Summarizing Dialogues with Negative Cues

Building query graphs from natural language
questions is an important step in complex question answering over knowledge graph (Complex KGQA). In general, a question can be correctly answered if its query graph is built correctly and the right answer is then retrieved by
issuing the query graph against the KG. Therefore, this paper focuses on query graph generation from natural language questions. Existing approaches for query graph generation
ignore the semantic structure of a question, resulting in a large number of noisy query graph
candidates that undermine prediction accuracies. In this paper, we define six semantic
structures from common questions in KGQA
and develop a novel Structure-BERT to predict the semantic structure of a question. By
doing so, we can first filter out noisy candidate query graphs, and then rank the remaining
candidates with a BERT-based ranking model.
Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks MetaQA and WebQuestionsSP (WSP)
demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as
compared to state-of-the-arts.

Semantic Structure based Query Graph Prediction for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the foundation of global health statistics and epidemiology. The ICD is designed to translate health conditions into alphanumeric codes. A number of approaches have been proposed for automatic ICD coding, since manual coding is labor-intensive and there is a global shortage of healthcare workers. However, existing studies did not exploit the discourse structure of clinical notes, which provides rich contextual information for code assignment. In this paper, we exploit the discourse structure by leveraging section type classification and section type embeddings. We also focus on the class-imbalanced problem and the heterogeneous writing style between clinical notes and ICD code definitions. The proposed reconciled embedding approach is able to tackle them simultaneously. Experimental results on the MIMIC dataset show that our model outperforms all previous state-of-the-art models by a large margin.
The source code is available at https://github.com/discnet2022/discnet


Automatic ICD coding exploiting discourse structure and reconciled code embeddings

Unsupervised contrastive sentence embedding models, e.g., unsupervised SimCSE, use the InfoNCE loss function in training. Theoretically, we expect to use larger batches to get more adequate comparisons among samples and avoid overfitting. However, increasing batch size leads to performance degradation when it exceeds a threshold, which is probably due to the introduction of false-negative pairs through statistical observation. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a simple smoothing strategy upon the InfoNCE loss function, termed Gaussian Smoothed InfoNCE (GS-InfoNCE). In other words, we add random Gaussian noise as an extension to the negative pairs without increasing the batch size. Through experiments on the semantic text similarity tasks, though simple, the proposed smoothing strategy brings improvements to unsupervised SimCSE.

Smoothed Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding

We examine the inducement of rare but severe errors in English-Chinese and Chinese-English in-domain neural machine translation by minimal deletion of the source text with character-based models. By deleting a single character, we can induce severe translation errors. We categorize these errors and compare the results of deleting single characters and single words. We also examine the effect of training data size on the number and types of pathological cases induced by these minimal perturbations, finding significant variation. We find that deleting a word hurts overall translation score more than deleting a character, but certain errors are more likely to occur when deleting characters, with language direction also influencing the effect.

Rare but Severe Neural Machine Translation Errors Induced by Minimal Deletion: An Empirical Study on Chinese and English

In-the-Wild Video Question Answering

Entity linking, which aims at aligning ambiguous entity mentions to their referent entities in a knowledge base, plays a key role in multiple natural language processing tasks. Recently, zero-shot entity linking task has become a research hotspot, which links mentions to unseen entities to challenge the generalization ability. For this task, the training set and test set are from different domains, and thus entity linking models tend to be overfitting due to the tendency of memorizing the properties of entities that appear frequently in the training set. We argue that general ultra-fine-grained type information can help the linking models to learn contextual commonality and improve their generalization ability to tackle the overfitting problem. However, in the zero-shot entity linking setting, any type information is not available and entities are only identified by textual descriptions. Thus, we first extract the ultra-fine type information from the entity textual descriptions. Then, we propose a hierarchical multi-task model to improve the high-level zero-shot entity linking candidate generation task by utilizing the entity typing task as an auxiliary low-level task, which introduces extracted ultra-fine type information into the candidate generation task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing the ultra-fine entity type information and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information

Fact-checking has gained increasing attention due to the widespread of falsified information. Most fact-checking approaches focus on claims made in English only due to the data scarcity issue in other languages. The lack of fact-checking datasets in low-resource languages calls for an effective cross-lingual transfer technique for fact-checking. Additionally, trustworthy information in different languages can be complementary and helpful in verifying facts. To this end, we present the first fact-checking framework augmented with cross-lingual retrieval that aggregates evidence retrieved from multiple languages through a cross-lingual retriever. Given the absence of cross-lingual information retrieval datasets with claim-like queries, we train the retriever with our proposed Cross-lingual Inverse Cloze Task (X-ICT), a self-supervised algorithm that creates training instances by translating the title of a passage. The goal for X-ICT is to learn cross-lingual retrieval in which the model learns to identify the passage corresponding to a given translated title. On the X-Fact dataset, our approach achieves 2.23% absolute F1 improvement in the zero-shot cross-lingual setup over prior systems. The source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/khuangaf/CONCRETE.

CONCRETE: Improving Cross-lingual Fact-checking with Cross-lingual Retrieval

Patients with low health literacy usually have difficulty understanding medical jargon and the complex structure of professional medical language. Although some studies are proposed to automatically translate expert language into layperson-understandable language, only a few of them focus on both accuracy and readability aspects simultaneously in the clinical domain. Thus, simplification of the clinical language is still a challenging task, but unfortunately, it is not yet fully addressed in previous work. To benchmark this task, we construct a new dataset named MedLane to support the development and evaluation of automated clinical language simplification approaches. Besides, we propose a new model called DECLARE that follows the human annotation procedure and achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with eight strong baselines. To fairly evaluate the performance, we also propose three specific evaluation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of the annotated MedLane dataset and the effectiveness of the proposed model DECLARE.


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Recent Advances in Text-to-SQL: A Survey of What We Have and What We Expect

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