Combining Small Language Models and Large Language Models for Zero-Shot NL2SQL

Abstract

Zero-shot natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) aims to generalize pretrained NL2SQL models to new environments ( e.g. , new databases and new linguistic phenomena) without any annotated NL2SQL samples from these environments. Existing approaches either use small language models (SLMs) like BART and T5, or prompt large language models (LLMs). However, SLMs may struggle with complex natural language reasoning, and LLMs may not precisely align schemas to identify the correct columns or tables. In this paper, we propose a ZeroNL2SQL framework, which divides NL2SQL into smaller sub-tasks and utilizes both SLMs and LLMs. ZeroNL2SQL first fine-tunes SLMs for better generalizability in SQL structure identification and schema alignment, producing an SQL sketch. It then uses LLMs's language reasoning capability to fill in the missing information in the SQL sketch. To support ZeroNL2SQL, we propose novel database serialization and question-aware alignment methods for effective sketch generation using SLMs. Additionally, we devise a multi-level matching strategy to recommend the most relevant values to LLMs, and select the optimal SQL query via an execution-based strategy. Comprehensive experiments show that ZeroNL2SQL achieves the best zero-shot NL2SQL performance on benchmarks, i.e. , outperforming the state-of-the-art SLM-based methods by 5.5% to 16.4% and exceeding LLM-based methods by 10% to 20% on execution accuracy.