Multi-hop Relational Graph Attention Network for Text-to-SQL Parsing

Text-to-SQL aims to parse natural language problems into SQL queries, which can provide a simple interface to access large databases enabling SQL novices a quicker entry into databases. As the Text-to-SQL field is intensively studied, more and more models use GNNs to encode heterogeneous graph information in this task, and how to better obtain path information between nodes in database schema heterogeneous graphs and question-database schema heterogeneous graphs will greatly affect the effectiveness of the model parsing. Our work intends to explore the problem of solving the encoding of heterogeneous graph meta-paths in the Text-to-SQL task. Previous approaches usually use multi-layer GNNs to aggregate topological structure information between nodes. However, they ignored the structural information embedded at the edges and also failed to obtain nodes that are not directly connected but can provide contextual information through meta-paths. To solve the above problem, we propose Multi-Hop Relational Graph Attention Network based Text-to-SQL Parsing Model (MHRGATSQL) for learning topological information between nodes while obtaining semantic information embedded in the edge topology. We use multi-hop attention to modify the relational graph attention network to diffuse the attention scores throughout the network, thus increasing the "receptive field" of each layer of RGAT. Experimental results on the large-scale cross-domain Text-to-SQL dataset Spider show that our model obtains an absolute improvement of 1.7% compared to the baseline and alleviates the over-smoothing problem in the deep network model.