← Search

Patrick Ng

17 accepted papers

2025

PRACTIQ: A Practical Conversational Text-to-SQL dataset with Ambiguous and Unanswerable Queries

NAACL 2025long

Previous text-to-SQL datasets and systems have primarily focused on user questions with clear intentions that can be answered. However, real user questions can often be ambiguous with multiple interpretations or unanswerable due to a lack of relevant data. In this work, we construct a practical conv…

2025

You Only Read Once (YORO): Learning to Internalize Database Knowledge for Text-to-SQL

NAACL 2025long

While significant progress has been made on the text-to-SQL task, recent solutions repeatedly encode the same database schema for every question, resulting in unnecessary high inference cost and often overlooking crucial database knowledge. To address these issues, we propose You Only Read Once (YOR…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Propagation and Pitfalls: Reasoning-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing through Counterfactual Tasks

ACL 2024findings

Current knowledge editing approaches struggle to effectively propagate updates to interconnected facts.In this work, we delve into the barriers that hinder the appropriate propagation of updated knowledge within these models for accurate reasoning. To support our analysis, we introduce a novel reaso…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Benchmarking Diverse-Modal Entity Linking with Generative Models

ACL 2023findings

Entities can be expressed in diverse formats, such as texts, images, or column names and cell values in tables. While existing entity linking (EL) models work well on per modality configuration, such as text-only EL, visual grounding or schema linking, it is more challenging to design a unified mode…

2023

DecAF: Joint Decoding of Answers and Logical Forms for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases

ICLR 2023poster

Question answering over knowledge bases (KBs) aims to answer natural language questions with factual information such as entities and relations in KBs. Previous methods either generate logical forms that can be executed over KBs to obtain final answers or predict answers directly. Empirical results…

2023

Dr.Spider: A Diagnostic Evaluation Benchmark towards Text-to-SQL Robustness

ICLR 2023top-5%

Neural text-to-SQL models have achieved remarkable performance in translating natural language questions into SQL queries. However, recent studies reveal that text-to-SQL models are vulnerable to task-specific perturbations. Previous curated robustness test sets usually focus on individual phenomena…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2023

Few-Shot Data-to-Text Generation via Unified Representation and Multi-Source Learning

ACL 2023long

In this paper, we present a novel approach for data-to-text generation that addresses the limitations of current methods that primarily focus on specific types of structured data. Our proposed method aims to improve performance in multi-task training, zero-shot and few-shot scenarios by providing a…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Generate then Select: Open-ended Visual Question Answering Guided by World Knowledge

ACL 2023findings

The open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) task requires AI models to jointly reason over visual and natural language inputs using world knowledge. Recently, pre-trained Language Models (PLM) such as GPT-3 have been applied to the task and shown to be powerful world knowledge sources. However, t…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2023

Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing

ACL 2023findings

There has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented syntheti…

2023

Improving Cross-task Generalization of Unified Table-to-text Models with Compositional Task Configurations

ACL 2023findings

There has been great progress in unifying various table-to-text tasks using a single encoder-decoder model trained via multi-task learning (Xie et al., 2022).However, existing methods typically encode task information with a simple dataset name as a prefix to the encoder. This not only limits the ef…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2022

Generation-Focused Table-Based Intermediate Pre-training for Free-Form Question Answering

AAAI 2022technical

Question answering over semi-structured tables has attracted significant attention in the NLP community. However, most of the existing work focus on questions that can be answered with short-form answer, i.e. the answer is often a table cell or aggregation of multiple cells. This can mismatch wit…

2022

Improving Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing with Fine-grained Query Understanding

EMNLP 2022industry

Most recent research on Text-to-SQL semantic parsing relies on either parser itself or simple heuristic based approach to understand natural language query (NLQ). When synthesizing a SQL query, there is no explicit semantic information of NLQ available to the parser which leads to undesirable genera…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2021

Answering Ambiguous Questions through Generative Evidence Fusion and Round-Trip Prediction

ACL 2021long

In open-domain question answering, questions are highly likely to be ambiguous because users may not know the scope of relevant topics when formulating them. Therefore, a system needs to find possible interpretations of the question, and predict one or multiple plausible answers. When multiple plaus…

2021

Dual Reader-Parser on Hybrid Textual and Tabular Evidence for Open Domain Question Answering

ACL 2021long

The current state-of-the-art generative models for open-domain question answering (ODQA) have focused on generating direct answers from unstructured textual information. However, a large amount of world’s knowledge is stored in structured databases, and need to be accessed using query languages such…

2021

Generative Context Pair Selection for Multi-hop Question Answering

EMNLP 2021main

Compositional reasoning tasks such as multi-hop question answering require models to learn how to make latent decisions using only weak supervision from the final answer. Crowdsourced datasets gathered for these tasks, however, often contain only a slice of the underlying task distribution, which ca…

2021

Improving Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization via Question Answering

ACL 2021long

A commonly observed problem with the state-of-the art abstractive summarization models is that the generated summaries can be factually inconsistent with the input documents. The fact that automatic summarization may produce plausible-sounding yet inaccurate summaries is a major concern that limits…

2021

Learning Contextual Representations for Semantic Parsing with Generation-Augmented Pre-Training

AAAI 2021technical

Most recently, there has been significant interest in learning contextual representations for various NLP tasks, by leveraging large scale text corpora to train powerful language models with self-supervised learning objectives, such as Masked Language Model (MLM). Based on a pilot study, we observe…