Know What I don't Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unanswerable Questions for Text-to-SQL

Understand

The task of text-to-SQL aims to convert a natural language question into its corresponding SQL query within the context of relational tables.

• Existing text-to-SQL parsers generate a "plausible" SQL query for an arbitrary user question, thereby failing to correctly handle problematic user questions.
• To formalize this problem, we conduct a preliminary study on the observed ambiguous and unanswerable cases in text-to-SQL and summarize them into 6 feature categories.
• Correspondingly, we identify the causes behind each category and propose requirements for handling ambiguous and unanswerable questions.