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arXiv · 2510.23854

Can LLMs Narrate Tabular Data? An Evaluation Framework for Natural Language Representations of Text-to-SQL System Outputs

Jyotika Singh·Weiyi Sun·Amit Agarwal·Viji Krishnamurthy·Yassine Benajiba·Sujith Ravi·Dan Roth
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Abstract

In modern industry systems like multi-turn chat agents, Text-to-SQL technology bridges natural language (NL) questions and database (DB) querying. The conversion of tabular DB results into NL representations (NLRs) enables the chat-based interaction. Currently, NLR generation is typically handled by large language models (LLMs), but information loss or errors in presenting tabular results in NL remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces a novel evaluation method - Combo-Eval - for judgment of LLM-generated NLRs that combines the benefits of multiple existing methods, optimizing evaluation fidelity and achieving a significant reduction in LLM calls by 25-61%. Accompanying our method is NLR-BIRD, the first dedicated dataset for NLR benchmarking. Through human evaluations, we demonstrate the superior alignment of Combo-Eval with human judgments, applicable across scenarios with and without ground truth references.

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Jyotika Singh, Weiyi Sun, Amit Agarwal, Viji Krishnamurthy, Yassine Benajiba, Sujith Ravi, Dan Roth. 2025-10-27. Can LLMs Narrate Tabular Data? An Evaluation Framework for Natural Language Representations of Text-to-SQL System Outputs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23854

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