BlendSQL: A Scalable Dialect for Unifying Hybrid Question Answering in Relational Algebra

Understand

Many existing end-to-end systems for hybrid question answering tasks can often be boiled down to a "prompt-and-pray" paradigm, where the user has limited control and insight into the intermediate reasoning steps used to achieve the final result.

• Additionally, due to the context size limitation of many transformer-based LLMs, it is often not reasonable to expect that the full structured and unstructured context will fit into a given prompt in a zero-shot setting, let alone a few-shot setting.
• We introduce BlendSQL, a superset of SQLite to act as a unified dialect for orchestrating reasoning across both unstructured and structured data.
• For hybrid question answering tasks involving multi-hop reasoning, we encode the full decomposed reasoning roadmap into a single interpretable BlendSQL query.