DBMSs Should Talk Back Too
Alkis Simitsis (HP Labs), Yannis Ioannidis

TL;DR
This paper advocates for developing natural language interfaces that can translate database query results and data back into natural language to improve verification, validation, and user interaction with database systems.
Contribution
It introduces the novel concept of reverse translation from database results and data into natural language, highlighting technical challenges and research problems involved.
Findings
Identifies the need for expressive and effective natural language translation in databases.
Highlights technical challenges in achieving accurate and fast reverse translation.
Proposes research problems for data and query translation in natural language interfaces.
Abstract
Natural language user interfaces to database systems have been studied for several decades now. They have mainly focused on parsing and interpreting natural language queries to generate them in a formal database language. We envision the reverse functionality, where the system would be able to take the internal result of that translation, say in SQL form, translate it back into natural language, and show it to the initiator of the query for verification. Likewise, information extraction has received considerable attention in the past ten years or so, identifying structured information in free text so that it may then be stored appropriately and queried. Validation of the records stored with a backward translation into text would again be very powerful. Verification and validation of query and data input of a database system correspond to just one example of the many important…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Database Systems and Queries · Semantic Web and Ontologies · Scientific Computing and Data Management
