ValueNet: A Natural Language-to-SQL System that Learns from Database Information

In this paper we propose ValueNet light and ValueNet – two end-to-end Natural Language-to-SQL systems that incor-porate values using the challenging Spider dataset. The main idea of our approach is to use not only metadata information from the underlying database but also information on the base data as input for our neural network architecture. In particular, we propose a novel architecture sketch to extract values from a user question and come up with possible value candidates which are not explicitly mentioned in the question. We then use a neural model based on an encoder-decoder architecture to synthesize the SQL query. Finally, we evaluate our model on the Spider challenge using the Execution Accuracy metric, a more difficult metric than used by most participants of the challenge. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that ValueNet light and ValueNet reach state-of-the-art results of 67% and 62% accuracy, respectively, for translating from NL to SQL whilst incorporating values.