Evaluating NL2SQL via SQL2NL

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Safarzadeh, Mohammadtaher, Oroojlooyjadid, Afshin, Roth, Dan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915480174854144
author Safarzadeh, Mohammadtaher
Oroojlooyjadid, Afshin
Roth, Dan
author_facet Safarzadeh, Mohammadtaher
Oroojlooyjadid, Afshin
Roth, Dan
contents Robust evaluation in the presence of linguistic variation is key to understanding the generalization capabilities of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) models, yet existing benchmarks rarely address this factor in a systematic or controlled manner. We propose a novel schema-aligned paraphrasing framework that leverages SQL-to-NL (SQL2NL) to automatically generate semantically equivalent, lexically diverse queries while maintaining alignment with the original schema and intent. This enables the first targeted evaluation of NL2SQL robustness to linguistic variation in isolation-distinct from prior work that primarily investigates ambiguity or schema perturbations. Our analysis reveals that state-of-the-art models are far more brittle than standard benchmarks suggest. For example, LLaMa3.3-70B exhibits a 10.23% drop in execution accuracy (from 77.11% to 66.9%) on paraphrased Spider queries, while LLaMa3.1-8B suffers an even larger drop of nearly 20% (from 62.9% to 42.5%). Smaller models (e.g., GPT-4o mini) are disproportionately affected. We also find that robustness degradation varies significantly with query complexity, dataset, and domain -- highlighting the need for evaluation frameworks that explicitly measure linguistic generalization to ensure reliable performance in real-world settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating NL2SQL via SQL2NL
Safarzadeh, Mohammadtaher
Oroojlooyjadid, Afshin
Roth, Dan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Machine Learning
Robust evaluation in the presence of linguistic variation is key to understanding the generalization capabilities of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) models, yet existing benchmarks rarely address this factor in a systematic or controlled manner. We propose a novel schema-aligned paraphrasing framework that leverages SQL-to-NL (SQL2NL) to automatically generate semantically equivalent, lexically diverse queries while maintaining alignment with the original schema and intent. This enables the first targeted evaluation of NL2SQL robustness to linguistic variation in isolation-distinct from prior work that primarily investigates ambiguity or schema perturbations. Our analysis reveals that state-of-the-art models are far more brittle than standard benchmarks suggest. For example, LLaMa3.3-70B exhibits a 10.23% drop in execution accuracy (from 77.11% to 66.9%) on paraphrased Spider queries, while LLaMa3.1-8B suffers an even larger drop of nearly 20% (from 62.9% to 42.5%). Smaller models (e.g., GPT-4o mini) are disproportionately affected. We also find that robustness degradation varies significantly with query complexity, dataset, and domain -- highlighting the need for evaluation frameworks that explicitly measure linguistic generalization to ensure reliable performance in real-world settings.
title Evaluating NL2SQL via SQL2NL
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04657