BenchPress: A Human-in-the-Loop Annotation System for Rapid Text-to-SQL Benchmark Curation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wenz, Fabian, Bouattour, Omar, Yang, Devin, Choi, Justin, Gregg, Cecil, Tatbul, Nesime, Demiralp, Çağatay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wenz, Fabian
Bouattour, Omar
Yang, Devin
Choi, Justin
Gregg, Cecil
Tatbul, Nesime
Demiralp, Çağatay
author_facet Wenz, Fabian
Bouattour, Omar
Yang, Devin
Choi, Justin
Gregg, Cecil
Tatbul, Nesime
Demiralp, Çağatay
contents Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully applied to many tasks, including text-to-SQL generation. However, much of this work has focused on publicly available datasets, such as Fiben, Spider, and Bird. Our earlier work showed that LLMs are much less effective in querying large private enterprise data warehouses and released Beaver, the first private enterprise text-to-SQL benchmark. To create Beaver, we leveraged SQL logs, which are often readily available. However, manually annotating these logs to identify which natural language questions they answer is a daunting task. Asking database administrators, who are highly trained experts, to take on additional work to construct and validate corresponding natural language utterances is not only challenging but also quite costly. To address this challenge, we introduce BenchPress, a human-in-the-loop system designed to accelerate the creation of domain-specific text-to-SQL benchmarks. Given a SQL query, BenchPress uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and LLMs to propose multiple natural language descriptions. Human experts then select, rank, or edit these drafts to ensure accuracy and domain alignment. We evaluated BenchPress on annotated enterprise SQL logs, demonstrating that LLM-assisted annotation drastically reduces the time and effort required to create high-quality benchmarks. Our results show that combining human verification with LLM-generated suggestions enhances annotation accuracy, benchmark reliability, and model evaluation robustness. By streamlining the creation of custom benchmarks, BenchPress offers researchers and practitioners a mechanism for assessing text-to-SQL models on a given domain-specific workload. BenchPress is freely available via our public GitHub repository at https://github.com/fabian-wenz/enterprise-txt2sql and is also accessible on our website at http://dsg-mcgraw.csail.mit.edu:5000.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13853
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BenchPress: A Human-in-the-Loop Annotation System for Rapid Text-to-SQL Benchmark Curation
Wenz, Fabian
Bouattour, Omar
Yang, Devin
Choi, Justin
Gregg, Cecil
Tatbul, Nesime
Demiralp, Çağatay
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Human-Computer Interaction
Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully applied to many tasks, including text-to-SQL generation. However, much of this work has focused on publicly available datasets, such as Fiben, Spider, and Bird. Our earlier work showed that LLMs are much less effective in querying large private enterprise data warehouses and released Beaver, the first private enterprise text-to-SQL benchmark. To create Beaver, we leveraged SQL logs, which are often readily available. However, manually annotating these logs to identify which natural language questions they answer is a daunting task. Asking database administrators, who are highly trained experts, to take on additional work to construct and validate corresponding natural language utterances is not only challenging but also quite costly. To address this challenge, we introduce BenchPress, a human-in-the-loop system designed to accelerate the creation of domain-specific text-to-SQL benchmarks. Given a SQL query, BenchPress uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and LLMs to propose multiple natural language descriptions. Human experts then select, rank, or edit these drafts to ensure accuracy and domain alignment. We evaluated BenchPress on annotated enterprise SQL logs, demonstrating that LLM-assisted annotation drastically reduces the time and effort required to create high-quality benchmarks. Our results show that combining human verification with LLM-generated suggestions enhances annotation accuracy, benchmark reliability, and model evaluation robustness. By streamlining the creation of custom benchmarks, BenchPress offers researchers and practitioners a mechanism for assessing text-to-SQL models on a given domain-specific workload. BenchPress is freely available via our public GitHub repository at https://github.com/fabian-wenz/enterprise-txt2sql and is also accessible on our website at http://dsg-mcgraw.csail.mit.edu:5000.
title BenchPress: A Human-in-the-Loop Annotation System for Rapid Text-to-SQL Benchmark Curation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Databases
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13853