GPT-Based Text-to-SQL for Spatial Databases

• Published in: ISPRS international journal of geo-information Vol. 14; no. 8; p. 288
• Main Authors: Wang, Hui, Guo, Li, Liang, Yubin, Liu, Le, Huang, Jiajin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 24.07.2025
• Subjects: Datasets; Deep learning; Design; Geometry; Geospatial data; GPT; Language; Machine learning; Methods; Natural language; Prompt engineering; Queries; Query languages; Questions; Relational data bases; Servers; Spatial data; spatial databases; Text-to-SQL; Training; Translating and interpreting; China
• ISSN: 2220-9964; 2220-9964
• DOI: 10.3390/ijgi14080288

Text-to-SQL for spatial databases enables the translation of natural language questions into corresponding SQL queries, allowing non-experts to easily access spatial data, which has gained increasing attention from researchers. Previous research has primarily focused on rule-based methods. However, these methods have limitations when dealing with complicated or unknown natural language questions. While advanced machine learning models can be trained, they typically require large labeled training datasets, which are severely lacking for spatial databases. Recently, Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for Text-to-SQL tasks in relational databases, driven by carefully designed prompts. In response to the severe lack of datasets for spatial databases, we have created a publicly available dataset that supports both English and Chinese. Furthermore, we propose a GPT-based method to construct prompts for spatial databases, which incorporates geographic and spatial database knowledge into the prompts and requires only a small number of training samples, such as 1, 3, or 5 examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that incorporating geographic and spatial database knowledge into prompts improves the accuracy of Text-to-SQL tasks for spatial databases. Our proposed method can help non-experts access spatial databases more easily and conveniently.