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arXiv · 2505.15874

Text-to-Pipeline: Bridging Natural Language and Data Preparation Pipelines

Yuhang Ge·Yachuan Liu·Zhangyan Ye·Yuren Mao·Yunjun Gao
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Abstract

Data preparation (DP) transforms raw data into a form suitable for downstream applications, typically by composing operations into executable pipelines. Building such pipelines is time-consuming and requires sophisticated programming skills, posing a significant barrier for non-experts. To lower this barrier, we introduce Text-to-Pipeline, a new task that translates NL data preparation instructions into DP pipelines, and PARROT, a large-scale benchmark to support systematic evaluation. To ensure realistic DP scenarios, PARROT is built by mining transformation patterns from production pipelines and instantiating them on 23,009 real-world tables, resulting in ~18,000 tasks spanning 16 core operators. Our empirical evaluation on PARROT reveals a critical failure mode in cutting-edge LLMs: they struggle not only with multi-step compositional logic but also with semantic parameter grounding. We thus establish a strong baseline with Pipeline-Agent, an execution-aware agent that iteratively reflects on intermediate states. While it achieves state-of-the-art performance, a significant gap remains, underscoring the deep, unsolved challenges for PARROT. It provides the essential, large-scale testbed for developing and evaluating the next generation of autonomous data preparation agentic systems.

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Yuhang Ge, Yachuan Liu, Zhangyan Ye, Yuren Mao, Yunjun Gao. 2025-05-21. Text-to-Pipeline: Bridging Natural Language and Data Preparation Pipelines. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15874

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