---
title: "Seq2SQL — paper by Zhong et al. (2017) — summary and ideas"
description: "To this end, they propose the Seq2SQL model. 42 references, cited by 493 papers here. Among them: 733."
authors: ["Victor Zhong", "Caiming Xiong", "Richard Socher"]
year: 2017
venue: "arXiv:1709.00103"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00103"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.1709.00103"
arxiv: "1709.00103"
licence: "arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute"
licence_url: "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhong-2017-seq2sql-generating-structured-queries-natural/"
---
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# Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning

**Authors:** [Victor Zhong](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/victor-zhong/), [Caiming Xiong](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/caiming-xiong/) and [Richard Socher](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/richard-socher/) · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** arXiv:1709.00103 · **Licence:** [arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute](http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00103) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.00103) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.1709.00103](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1709.00103) · [arXiv 1709.00103](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00103) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2751448157)

**Citations:** 733 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [493](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhong-2017-seq2sql-generating-structured-queries-natural/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper addresses natural language interfaces to relational databases. The authors aim to let a person ask a question in ordinary language and obtain the corresponding SQL query without knowing the query language. To this end, they propose the Seq2SQL model. It relies on the typical structure of SQL and splits generation into three steps: selecting the aggregation operation, selecting the column for SELECT, and constructing the WHERE conditions. The first two steps are trained with cross entropy. The model learns the WHERE conditions using policy gradient: the generated query is executed against the database, and its result serves as the reward. As a result, the model is not penalized if it writes equivalent conditions in a different order. The second contribution is the WikiSQL corpus. It contains questions about tables from Wikipedia, paraphrased by people via crowdsourcing, together with the corresponding queries. Along with the corpus, the authors release an engine for executing these queries. On WikiSQL, Seq2SQL clearly outperforms the best semantic parser available at the time. The work is significant because it provided a large benchmark dataset for the text-to-SQL task. It also showed that reinforcement learning combined with the structural constraints of SQL yields better results.

## Key points
- **WikiSQL** contains 80,654 "question + SQL query" examples based on 24,241 tables from Wikipedia. This is roughly an order of magnitude more than previous semantic parsing datasets with logical forms. The tables are released in JSON format and as an SQL database.
- **How the data were collected.** For each selected table, 6 queries were generated automatically. The aggregation could be empty or COUNT, and for numeric columns also MIN or MAX. The conditions allow the `=` operator, and for numbers also `>` and `<`. The template questions were paraphrased by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Each paraphrase was verified by two more people. Only paraphrases whose character-level edit distance from the template question exceeds 10 were kept.
- **Results.** Seq2SQL achieves an execution accuracy of 59.4% versus 35.9% for the Seq2Seq parser of Dong & Lapata (2016). Logical form accuracy rises from 23.4% to 48.3%. The augmented pointer network, as an intermediate baseline, reaches 53.3% execution accuracy.
- **Architecture.** The encoder is a two-layer bidirectional LSTM. Its input consists of the column names, the SQL vocabulary, and the question itself, separated by special tokens. The aggregation is determined by a classifier, and the SELECT column is chosen by a pointer mechanism. The WHERE conditions are generated by a pointer decoder trained jointly with RL on a mixed objective function.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong and Richard Socher. 2017. Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning. arXiv:1709.00103.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{zhong2017seq2sql,
  title = {{Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning}},
  author = {Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong and Richard Socher},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.1709.00103},
  eprint = {1709.00103},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1709.00103}
}
```

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## References

42 references, 16 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 29 October 2026*