STARQA: A Question Answering Dataset for Complex Analytical Reasoning over Structured Databases

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Main Authors: Maddela, Mounica, Xie, Lingjue, Preotiuc-Pietro, Daniel, Mausam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Maddela, Mounica
Xie, Lingjue
Preotiuc-Pietro, Daniel
Mausam
author_facet Maddela, Mounica
Xie, Lingjue
Preotiuc-Pietro, Daniel
Mausam
contents Semantic parsing methods for converting text to SQL queries enable question answering over structured data and can greatly benefit analysts who routinely perform complex analytics on vast data stored in specialized relational databases. Although several benchmarks measure the abilities of text to SQL, the complexity of their questions is inherently limited by the level of expressiveness in query languages and none focus explicitly on questions involving complex analytical reasoning which require operations such as calculations over aggregate analytics, time series analysis or scenario understanding. In this paper, we introduce STARQA, the first public human-created dataset of complex analytical reasoning questions and answers on three specialized-domain databases. In addition to generating SQL directly using LLMs, we evaluate a novel approach (Text2SQLCode) that decomposes the task into a combination of SQL and Python: SQL is responsible for data fetching, and Python more naturally performs reasoning. Our results demonstrate that identifying and combining the abilities of SQL and Python is beneficial compared to using SQL alone, yet the dataset still remains quite challenging for the existing state-of-the-art LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19508
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle STARQA: A Question Answering Dataset for Complex Analytical Reasoning over Structured Databases
Maddela, Mounica
Xie, Lingjue
Preotiuc-Pietro, Daniel
Mausam
Databases
Computation and Language
Semantic parsing methods for converting text to SQL queries enable question answering over structured data and can greatly benefit analysts who routinely perform complex analytics on vast data stored in specialized relational databases. Although several benchmarks measure the abilities of text to SQL, the complexity of their questions is inherently limited by the level of expressiveness in query languages and none focus explicitly on questions involving complex analytical reasoning which require operations such as calculations over aggregate analytics, time series analysis or scenario understanding. In this paper, we introduce STARQA, the first public human-created dataset of complex analytical reasoning questions and answers on three specialized-domain databases. In addition to generating SQL directly using LLMs, we evaluate a novel approach (Text2SQLCode) that decomposes the task into a combination of SQL and Python: SQL is responsible for data fetching, and Python more naturally performs reasoning. Our results demonstrate that identifying and combining the abilities of SQL and Python is beneficial compared to using SQL alone, yet the dataset still remains quite challenging for the existing state-of-the-art LLMs.
title STARQA: A Question Answering Dataset for Complex Analytical Reasoning over Structured Databases
topic Databases
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19508