An End-to-end Neural Natural Language Interface for Databases

TL;DR

This paper introduces DBPal, an end-to-end neural natural language interface for databases that translates natural language questions into SQL queries and assists users with auto-completion, improving data exploration for non-experts.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel neural NLIDB system that enhances query translation robustness and provides learned auto-completion to support users in formulating complex database queries.

Findings

Deep model improves translation accuracy for natural language to SQL.

Auto-completion assists users in query formulation.

System demonstrates robustness to linguistic variations.

Abstract

The ability to extract insights from new data sets is critical for decision making. Visual interactive tools play an important role in data exploration since they provide non-technical users with an effective way to visually compose queries and comprehend the results. Natural language has recently gained traction as an alternative query interface to databases with the potential to enable non-expert users to formulate complex questions and information needs efficiently and effectively. However, understanding natural language questions and translating them accurately to SQL is a challenging task, and thus Natural Language Interfaces for Databases (NLIDBs) have not yet made their way into practical tools and commercial products. In this paper, we present DBPal, a novel data exploration tool with a natural language interface. DBPal leverages recent advances in deep models to make query understanding more robust in the following ways: First, DBPal uses a deep model to translate natural language statements to SQL, making the translation process more robust to paraphrasing and other linguistic variations. Second, to support the users in phrasing questions without knowing the database schema and the query features, DBPal provides a learned auto-completion model that suggests partial query extensions to users during query formulation and thus helps to write complex queries.