BIRDTurk: Adaptation of the BIRD Text-to-SQL Dataset to Turkish


Creative Commons License

Aktaş B., Baytekin M. C., Köse S. K., İlbilgi Ö., Yılmaz E. Ö., TORAMAN Ç., ...Daha Fazla

2nd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Turkic Languages, SIGTURK 2026, Rabat, Fas, 29 Mart 2026, ss.155-171, (Tam Metin Bildiri)

Özet

Text-to-SQL systems have achieved strong performance on English benchmarks, yet their behavior in morphologically rich, low-resource languages remains largely unexplored. We introduce BIRDTurk, the first Turkish adaptation of the BIRD benchmark, constructed through a controlled translation pipeline that adapts schema identifiers to Turkish while strictly preserving the logical structure and execution semantics of SQL queries and databases. Translation quality is validated on a sample size determined by the Central Limit Theorem to ensure 95% confidence, achieving 98.15% accuracy on human-evaluated samples. Using BIRDTurk, we evaluate inference-based prompting, agentic multi-stage reasoning, and supervised fine-tuning. Our results reveal that Turkish introduces consistent performance degradation-driven by both structural linguistic divergence and underrepresentation in LLM pretraining-while agentic reasoning demonstrates stronger cross-lingual robustness. Supervised fine-tuning remains challenging for standard multilingual baselines but scales effectively with modern instruction-tuned models. BIRDTurk provides a controlled testbed for cross-lingual Text-to-SQL evaluation under realistic database conditions. We release the training and development splits to support future research.