Publication
Netted?! How to Improve the Usefulness of Spider & Co
Benjamin Hättasch; Nadja Geisler; Carsten Binnig
In: Omar Alonso; Stefano Marchesin; Marc Najork; Gianmaria Silvello (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems. International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES), September 15-18, Padova, Italy, Pages 38-43, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2950, CEUR-WS.org, 2021.
Abstract
Natural language interfaces for databases (NLIDBs) are an intuitive way to access and explore structured data. That makes challenges like Spider (Yale’s semantic parsing and text-to-SQL challenge) valuable, as they produce a series of approaches for NL-to-SQL-translation. However, the resulting contributions leave something to be desired. In this paper, we analyze the usefulness of those submissions to the leaderboard for future research. We also present a prototypical implementation called UniverSQL that makes these approaches easier to use in information access systems. We hope that this lowered barrier encourages (future) participants of these challenges to add support for actual usage of their submissions. Finally, we discuss what could be done to improve future benchmarks and shared tasks for (not only) NLIDBs.