An Empirical Study of Model Errors and User Error Discovery and Repair Strategies in Natural Language Database Queries

Recent advances in machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) have led to significant improvement in natural language interfaces for structured databases (NL2SQL). Despite the great strides, the overall accuracy of NL2SQL models is still far from being perfect (∼75% on the Spider benchmark). In practice, this requires users to discern incorrect SQL queries generated by a model and manually fix them when using NL2SQL models. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding about the common errors in auto-generated SQLs and the effective strategies to recognize and fix such errors. To bridge the gap, we (1) performed an in-depth analysis of errors made by three state-of-the-art NL2SQL models; (2) distilled a taxonomy of NL2SQL model errors; and (3) conducted a within-subjects user study with 26 participants to investigate the effectiveness of three representative interactive mechanisms for error discovery and repair in NL2SQL. Findings from this paper shed light on the design of future error discovery and repair strategies for natural language data query interfaces.