Mention Extraction and Linking for SQL Query Generation

On the WikiSQL benchmark, state-of-the-art text-to-SQL systems typically take a slotfilling approach by building several dedicated models for each type of slots. Such modularized systems are not only complex but also of limited capacity for capturing interdependencies among SQL clauses. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel extraction-linking approach, where a unified extractor recognizes all types of slot mentions appearing in the question sentence before a linker maps the recognized columns to the table schema to generate executable SQL queries. Trained with automatically generated annotations, the proposed method achieves the first place on the WikiSQL benchmark.