Evance Mathewe

dblp:440/7425 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
1since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0006-4170-6749ORCID · reported

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
1 paper
Information extraction and text analysis · 100%
Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
1 paper
Data models and query languages · 100%

Topics — the 2 heaviest of 2, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis › semantic parsing
text-to-SQL
1.012026
Bridging the Language Gap in Text-to-SQL: Adapting LLMs for Chichewa in a Low-Resource Setting · SIGIR 2026
Data models and query languages › natural language interface › natural language interface to database
text-to-SQL
1.012026
Bridging the Language Gap in Text-to-SQL: Adapting LLMs for Chichewa in a Low-Resource Setting · SIGIR 2026

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

retrieval-augmented prompting · 2.0few-shot prompting · 2.0QLoRA · 2.0
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Bridging the Language Gap in Text-to-SQL: Adapting LLMs for Chichewa in a Low-Resource Setting
abstract
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved Text-to-SQL performance in high-resource languages. However, their effectiveness in low-resource language settings remains largely underexplored. In this work, we investigate the adaptation of LLMs for Text-to-SQL generation in Chichewa, a low-resource Bantu language spoken by over 12 million people in Malawi and neighboring regions. We construct a structured Chichewa Text-to-SQL benchmark consisting of 400 manually curated natural language–SQL pairs grounded in a unified relational database covering agriculture, commodity prices, population statistics, market data, and food insecurity. We systematically evaluate five open-source LLMs under zero-shot, random 5-shot, and retrieval-augmented 5-shot prompting, in both English and Chichewa. We then apply parameter-efficient fine-tuning (QLoRA) to selected models and, crucially, evaluate the combined effect of QLoRA fine-tuning with retrieval-augmented prompting. QLoRA alone improves English execution accuracy to 78.3% and Chichewa execution accuracy to 41.7%. When combined with retrieval-augmented prompting, QLoRA achieves 53.3% execution accuracy in Chichewa, representing the best reported result for this language on this benchmark and narrowing the English–Chichewa gap to 23.4 percentage points. Our findings offer practical guidance for deploying database interfaces in linguistically underserved environments.
John Emeka Eze, Dunstan Matekenya, Evance Mathewe
SIGIR3