Abacus-SQL: A Text-to-SQL System Empowering Cross-Domain and Open-Domain Database Retrieval

The existing text-to-SQL systems have made significant progress in SQL query generation, but they still face numerous challenges. Existing systems often lack retrieval capabilities for open-domain databases, requiring users to manually filter relevant databases. Additionally, their cross-domain transferability is limited, making it challenging to accommodate diverse query requirements. To address these issues, we propose Abacus-SQL. Abacus-SQL utilizes database retrieval technology to accurately locate the required databases in an open-domain database environment. It also enhances the system cross-domain transfer ability through data augmentation methods. Moreover, Abacus-SQL employs Pre-SQL and Self-debug methods, thereby enhancing the accuracy of SQL queries. Experimental results demonstrate that Abacus-SQL performs excellently in multi-turn text-to-SQL tasks, effectively validating the approach's effectiveness. Abacus-SQL is publicly accessible at https://huozi.8wss.com/abacus-sql/.

MULTITAT: Benchmarking Multilingual Table-and-Text Question Answering

Question answering on the hybrid context of tables and text (TATQA) is a critical task, with broad applications in data-intensive domains. However, existing TATQA datasets are limited to English, leading to several drawbacks: (i) They overlook the challenges of multilingual TAT-QA and cannot assess model performance in the multilingual setting. (ii) They do not reflect real-world scenarios where tables and texts frequently appear in non-English languages. To address the limitations, we propose the first multilingual TATQA dataset (MULTITAT). Specifically, we sample data from 3 mainstream TATQA datasets and translate it into 10 diverse languages. To align the model TATQA capabilities in English with other languages, we develop a baseline, Ours. Experimental results reveal that the performance on non-English data in MULTITAT drops by an average of 19.4% compared to English, proving the necessity of MULTITAT. We further analyze the reasons for this performance gap. Furthermore, Ours outperforms other baselines by an average of 3.3, demonstrating its effectiveness.

SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types

Scientific question answering (SQA) is an important task aimed at answering questions based on papers. However, current SQA datasets have limited reasoning types and neglect the relevance between tables and text, creating a significant gap with real scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a QA benchmark for scientific tables and text with diverse reasoning types (SciTaT). To cover more reasoning types, we summarize various reasoning types from real-world questions. To involve both tables and text, we require the questions to incorporate tables and text as much as possible. Based on SciTaT, we propose a strong baseline (CaR), which combines various reasoning methods to address different reasoning types and process tables and text at the same time. CaR brings average improvements of 12.9% over other baselines on SciTaT, validating its effectiveness. Error analysis reveals the challenges of SciTaT, such as complex numerical calculations and domain knowledge.