Text to Query Plans for Question Answering on Large Tables

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Yipeng, Wang, Chen, Zhang, Yuzhe, Jiang, Jacky
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhang, Yipeng
Wang, Chen
Zhang, Yuzhe
Jiang, Jacky
author_facet Zhang, Yipeng
Wang, Chen
Zhang, Yuzhe
Jiang, Jacky
contents Efficient querying and analysis of large tabular datasets remain significant challenges, especially for users without expertise in programming languages like SQL. Text-to-SQL approaches have shown promising performance on benchmark data; however, they inherit SQL's drawbacks, including inefficiency with large datasets and limited support for complex data analyses beyond basic querying. We propose a novel framework that transforms natural language queries into query plans. Our solution is implemented outside traditional databases, allowing us to support classical SQL commands while avoiding SQL's inherent limitations. Additionally, we enable complex analytical functions, such as principal component analysis and anomaly detection, providing greater flexibility and extensibility than traditional SQL capabilities. We leverage LLMs to iteratively interpret queries and construct operation sequences, addressing computational complexity by incrementally building solutions. By executing operations directly on the data, we overcome context length limitations without requiring the entire dataset to be processed by the model. We validate our framework through experiments on both standard databases and large scientific tables, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling extensive datasets and performing sophisticated data analyses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18758
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Text to Query Plans for Question Answering on Large Tables
Zhang, Yipeng
Wang, Chen
Zhang, Yuzhe
Jiang, Jacky
Databases
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Efficient querying and analysis of large tabular datasets remain significant challenges, especially for users without expertise in programming languages like SQL. Text-to-SQL approaches have shown promising performance on benchmark data; however, they inherit SQL's drawbacks, including inefficiency with large datasets and limited support for complex data analyses beyond basic querying. We propose a novel framework that transforms natural language queries into query plans. Our solution is implemented outside traditional databases, allowing us to support classical SQL commands while avoiding SQL's inherent limitations. Additionally, we enable complex analytical functions, such as principal component analysis and anomaly detection, providing greater flexibility and extensibility than traditional SQL capabilities. We leverage LLMs to iteratively interpret queries and construct operation sequences, addressing computational complexity by incrementally building solutions. By executing operations directly on the data, we overcome context length limitations without requiring the entire dataset to be processed by the model. We validate our framework through experiments on both standard databases and large scientific tables, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling extensive datasets and performing sophisticated data analyses.
title Text to Query Plans for Question Answering on Large Tables
topic Databases
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18758