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BlendSQL: A Scalable Dialect for Unifying Hybrid Question Answering in Relational Algebra

Parker Glenn, Parag Dakle, Liang Wang, Preethi Raghavan


Abstract
Many existing end-to-end systems for hybrid question answering tasks can often be boiled down to a “prompt-and-pray” paradigm, where the user has limited control and insight into the intermediate reasoning steps used to achieve the final result. Additionally, due to the context size limitation of many transformer-based LLMs, it is often not reasonable to expect that the full structured and unstructured context will fit into a given prompt in a zero-shot setting, let alone a few-shot setting. We introduce BlendSQL, a superset of SQLite to act as a unified dialect for orchestrating reasoning across both unstructured and structured data. For hybrid question answering tasks involving multi-hop reasoning, we encode the full decomposed reasoning roadmap into a single interpretable BlendSQL query. Notably, we show that BlendSQL can scale to massive datasets and improve the performance of end-to-end systems while using 35% fewer tokens. Our code is available and installable as a package at https://github.com/parkervg/blendsql.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.25
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
453–466
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.25
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.25
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Parker Glenn, Parag Dakle, Liang Wang, and Preethi Raghavan. 2024. BlendSQL: A Scalable Dialect for Unifying Hybrid Question Answering in Relational Algebra. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 453–466, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BlendSQL: A Scalable Dialect for Unifying Hybrid Question Answering in Relational Algebra (Glenn et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.25.pdf