Why, Where, How: Taxonomy-guided Error Grounding for Code Repair in NL2SQL

Abstract

SQL queries that large language models write from natural language questions can execute successfully yet produce incorrect results, so execution alone does not reveal what to fix. An error taxonomy says why the query is wrong, but not where to look or how to change it. Existing methods can guide SQL correction through feedback, error reports, or generated plans alongside an unmasked query. We introduce TEG(Taxonomy-guided Error Grounding), which turns a supplied diagnosis into a structured correction input for natural language-to-SQL (NL2SQL) correction. Type-specific rules map each error type to construct classes to reconsider and an edit operation to request. TEG masks the selected constructs in the query when applicable and states that operation in an edit instruction. TEG generates candidate corrections from this input, uses execution feedback to guide candidate selection, and repeats the process one annotation at a time for queries with several errors. On NL2SQL-BUGs, TEG reaches 47.3 single-error execution accuracy and 37.0 overall with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Across the model sizes and thinking modes evaluated in the main comparison, TEG outperforms all evaluated baselines on single-error queries, even when the baselines receive the same error-type annotations. With predicted types, TEG stays above direct LLM correction and ErrorLLM on single-error queries.