Bidirectional Attention for SQL Generation

Generating structural query language (SQL) queries from natural language is a long-standing open problem. Answering a natural language question about a database table requires modeling complex interactions between the columns of the table and the question. It has been attracting considerable interest recently and driven by the explosive development of deep learning techniques. In this paper, we apply the sketch-based approach or synthesizing way to solve this problem. Based on the structure of SQL queries, we break down the model to three sub-modules and design specific deep neural networks for each of them. We employ the bidirectional attention mechanisms and character-level embedding with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to improve the result. Experimental evaluations show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results in WikiSQL dataset.