ORANGE: An Online Reflection ANd GEneration framework with Domain Knowledge for Text-to-SQL

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in translating natural language to SQL, but a significant semantic gap persists between their general knowledge and domain-specific semantics of databases. Historical translation logs constitute a rich source of this missing in-domain knowledge, where SQL queries inherently encapsulate real-world usage patterns of database schema. Existing methods primarily enhance the reasoning process for individual translations but fail to accumulate in-domain knowledge from past translations. We introduce ORANGE, an online self-evolutionary framework that constructs database-specific knowledge bases by parsing SQL queries from translation logs. By accumulating in-domain knowledge that contains schema and data semantics, ORANGE progressively reduces the semantic gap and enhances the accuracy of subsequent SQL translations. To ensure reliability, we propose a novel nested Chain-of-Thought SQL-to-Text strategy with tuple-semantic tracking, which reduces semantic errors during knowledge generation. Experiments on multiple benchmarks confirm the practicality of ORANGE, demonstrating its effectiveness for real-world Text-to-SQL deployment, particularly in handling complex and domain-specific queries.