{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/leveraging-table-content-for-zero-shot-text","title":"Leveraging Table Content for Zero-shot Text-to-SQL with Meta-Learning","arxiv_id":"2109.05395","date":"2021-09-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yongrui Chen","Xinnan Guo","Chaojie Wang","Jian Qiu","Guilin Qi","Meng Wang","Huiying Li"],"abstract":"Single-table text-to-SQL aims to transform a natural language question into a SQL query according to one single table. Recent work has made promising progress on this task by pre-trained language models and a multi-submodule framework. However, zero-shot table, that is, the invisible table in the training set, is currently the most critical bottleneck restricting the application of existing approaches to real-world scenarios. Although some work has utilized auxiliary tasks to help handle zero-shot tables, expensive extra manual annotation limits their practicality. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the zero-shot text-to-SQL task which does not rely on any additional manual annotations. Our approach consists of two parts. First, we propose a new model that leverages the abundant information of table content to help establish the mapping between questions and zero-shot tables. Further, we propose a simple but efficient meta-learning strategy to train our model. The strategy utilizes the two-step gradient update to force the model to learn a generalization ability towards zero-shot tables. We conduct extensive experiments on a public open-domain text-to-SQL dataset WikiSQL and a domain-specific dataset ESQL. Compared to existing approaches using the same pre-trained model, our approach achieves significant improvements on both datasets. Compared to the larger pre-trained model and the tabular-specific pre-trained model, our approach is still competitive. More importantly, on the zero-shot subsets of both the datasets, our approach further increases the improvements.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05395v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.05395v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"leveraging-table-content-for-zero-shot-text","repo_url":"https://github.com/qjay612/meta_learning_NL2SQL","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"text-to-sql","task_name":"Text to SQL"},{"task_slug":"text-to-sql","task_name":"Text-To-SQL"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2109.05395","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}