Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven to have strong
abilities in various domains and tasks. We study the problem of prompt
designing in the text-to-SQL task and attempt to improve the LLMs' reasoning
ability when generating SQL queries. Besides the trivial few-shot in-context
learning setting, we design our chain-of-thought (CoT) prompt with a similar
method to schema linking. We provide a method named ACT-SQL to automatically
generate auto-CoT exemplars and thus the whole process doesn't need manual
labeling. Our approach is cost-saving since we only use the LLMs' API call once
when generating one SQL query. Furthermore, we extend our in-context learning
method to the multi-turn text-to-SQL task. The experiment results show that the
LLMs' performance can benefit from our ACT-SQL approach. Our approach achieves
SOTA performance on the Spider dev set among existing in-context learning
approaches.

我们研究了在文本到 SQL 任务中的提示设计问题，并尝试提高大型语言模型在生成 SQL 查询时的推理能力。我们设计了一种类似于模式链接的思维链 (CoT) 提示的方法，并提供了一种名为 ACT-SQL 的方法来自动生成自动 CoT 示例，从而整个过程不需要手动标注。我们的方法在生成一个 SQL 查询时仅使用一次 LLMs 的 API 调用，从而节省了成本。此外，我们将我们的上下文学习方法扩展到多轮文本到 SQL 任务。实验结果表明，LLMs 的性能可以受益于我们的 ACT-SQL 方法。在现有的上下文学习方法中，我们的方法在 Spider dev 数据集上实现了最好的性能。