Papers › Evaluating the Data Model Robustness of Text-to-SQL Systems Based on Real User Queries

Evaluating the Data Model Robustness of Text-to-SQL Systems Based on Real User Queries

13 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.08349archive 2025-07-28

Jonathan Fürst, Catherine Kosten, Farhad Nooralahzadeh, Yi Zhang, Kurt Stockinger

Text-to-SQL systems (also known as NL-to-SQL systems) have become an increasingly popular solution for bridging the gap between user capabilities and SQL-based data access. These systems translate user requests in natural language to valid SQL statements for a specific database. Recent Text-to-SQL systems have benefited from the rapid improvement of transformer-based language models. However, while Text-to-SQL systems that incorporate such models continuously reach new high scores on -- often synthetic -- benchmark datasets, a systematic exploration of their robustness towards different data models in a real-world, realistic scenario is notably missing. This paper provides the first in-depth evaluation of the data model robustness of Text-to-SQL systems in practice based on a multi-year international project focused on Text-to-SQL interfaces. Our evaluation is based on a real-world deployment of FootballDB, a system that was deployed over a 9 month period in the context of the FIFA World Cup 2022, during which about 6K natural language questions were asked and executed. All of our data is based on real user questions that were asked live to the system. We manually labeled and translated a subset of these questions for three different data models. For each data model, we explore the performance of representative Text-to-SQL systems and language models. We further quantify the impact of training data size, pre-, and post-processing steps as well as language model inference time. Our comprehensive evaluation sheds light on the design choices of real-world Text-to-SQL systems and their impact on moving from research prototypes to real deployments. Last, we provide a new benchmark dataset to the community, which is the first to enable the evaluation of different data models for the same dataset and is substantially more challenging than most previous datasets in terms of query complexity.

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