  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.

Computation and Language