SemanticAgent: A Semantics-Aware Framework for Text-to-SQL Data Synthesis

arXiv cs.AI / 4/25/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper argues that current text-to-SQL data synthesis relies too heavily on executability, which can preserve queries that run but still violate intended database semantics.
  • It introduces SemanticAgent, a semantics-aware framework that structures generation into three modules: an analyzer, a synthesizer, and a verifier.
  • Using a three-stage protocol (semantic analysis, stepwise synthesis, and diagnostic refinement), SemanticAgent converts execution-based checking into a more traceable reasoning workflow.
  • Experiments show SemanticAgent produces synthetic data that outperforms prior methods on semantic-quality evaluations and improves downstream fine-tuning performance, especially on semantics-intensive benchmarks.

Abstract

Existing text-to-SQL synthesis pipelines still conflate executability with semantic validity: syntactic checks and execution-based validation can retain queries that execute successfully while violating database semantics. To address these limitations, we propose SemanticAgent, a semantic-aware synthesis framework. SemanticAgent organizes synthesis around three specialized modules: an analyzer, a synthesizer, and a verifier. Through a three-stage protocol of semantic analysis, stepwise synthesis, and diagnostic refinement, SemanticAgent transforms execution-based validation alone into a traceable reasoning process. Our framework generates synthetic data that consistently outperforms prior synthesis methods under semantic-quality evaluation, leading to stronger downstream fine-tuning performance, especially on semantically demanding benchmarks.