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This work provides the first systematic study focused exclusively on value linking. First, we present a taxonomy that encapsulates the key steps and design choices for value linking. To enable a thorough analysis, we introduce VLD-Bench, a new, challenging benchmark that incorporates 18 categories of lexical and semantic discrepancies between values referenced in the queries and database entries. Our evaluation shows that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL systems suffer up to a 64% drop in execution accuracy due to value linking errors. A fine-grained analysis reveals how design choices impact robustness to linguistic variation and system latency, offering key insights and directions for future research.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3802029","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,18]],"date-time":"2026-05-18T18:19:16Z","timestamp":1779128356000},"page":"1-26","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Comparison and Analysis of Value Linking in Text-to-SQL systems: [Experiments &amp; Analysis]"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"4","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0002-4044-3992","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Apostolos","family":"Koukouvinis","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8285-5827","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"George","family":"Katsogiannis-Meimarakis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece and Universit\u00e9 Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7377-0116","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Georgia","family":"Koutrika","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Athena Research Center, Athens, Greece"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,18]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","unstructured":"Sheshansh Agrawal and Thien Nguyen. 2025. 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