Interpretable Text-to-SQL Generation with Joint Optimization.

The purpose of Text-to-SQL is to obtain the correct answer for a textual question from the database, which can take advantage of advanced database system to provide reliable and efficient response. Existing Text-to-SQL methods generally focus on accuracy by designing complex deep neural network models, and hardly consider interpretability, which is very important for serious applications. To address this, in this paper we propose a novel framework for Interpretable Text-to-SQL Generation (ITSG) with joint optimization, which achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and possesses two-level interpretability at the same time. The framework mainly consists of three layers: a sequence encoder which encodes questions, table headers and significant table contents, an attention-based LSTM layer which generates SQL queries and a reinforcement learning layer which boosts the execution accuracy. Comparing with state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets, the experimental results show the effectiveness and interpretability of our ITSG framework.