ETM: Modern Insights into Perspective on Text-to-SQL Evaluation in the Age of Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Ascoli, Benjamin G., Kandikonda, Yasoda Sai Ram, Choi, Jinho D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ascoli, Benjamin G.
Kandikonda, Yasoda Sai Ram
Choi, Jinho D.
author_facet Ascoli, Benjamin G.
Kandikonda, Yasoda Sai Ram
Choi, Jinho D.
contents The task of Text-to-SQL enables anyone to retrieve information from SQL databases using natural language. While this task has made substantial progress, the two primary evaluation metrics - Execution Accuracy (EXE) and Exact Set Matching Accuracy (ESM) - suffer from inherent limitations that can misrepresent performance. Specifically, ESM's rigid matching overlooks semantically correct but stylistically different queries, whereas EXE can overestimate correctness by ignoring structural errors that yield correct outputs. These shortcomings become especially problematic when assessing outputs from large language model (LLM)-based approaches without fine-tuning, which vary more in style and structure compared to their fine-tuned counterparts. Thus, we introduce a new metric, Enhanced Tree Matching (ETM), which mitigates these issues by comparing queries using both syntactic and semantic elements. Through evaluating nine LLM-based models, we show that EXE and ESM can produce false positive and negative rates as high as 23.0% and 28.9%, while ETM reduces these rates to 0.3% and 2.7%, respectively. We release our ETM script as open source, offering the community a more robust and reliable approach to evaluating Text-to-SQL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07313
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ETM: Modern Insights into Perspective on Text-to-SQL Evaluation in the Age of Large Language Models
Ascoli, Benjamin G.
Kandikonda, Yasoda Sai Ram
Choi, Jinho D.
Computation and Language
The task of Text-to-SQL enables anyone to retrieve information from SQL databases using natural language. While this task has made substantial progress, the two primary evaluation metrics - Execution Accuracy (EXE) and Exact Set Matching Accuracy (ESM) - suffer from inherent limitations that can misrepresent performance. Specifically, ESM's rigid matching overlooks semantically correct but stylistically different queries, whereas EXE can overestimate correctness by ignoring structural errors that yield correct outputs. These shortcomings become especially problematic when assessing outputs from large language model (LLM)-based approaches without fine-tuning, which vary more in style and structure compared to their fine-tuned counterparts. Thus, we introduce a new metric, Enhanced Tree Matching (ETM), which mitigates these issues by comparing queries using both syntactic and semantic elements. Through evaluating nine LLM-based models, we show that EXE and ESM can produce false positive and negative rates as high as 23.0% and 28.9%, while ETM reduces these rates to 0.3% and 2.7%, respectively. We release our ETM script as open source, offering the community a more robust and reliable approach to evaluating Text-to-SQL.
title ETM: Modern Insights into Perspective on Text-to-SQL Evaluation in the Age of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07313