Frameworks for Querying Databases Using Natural Language: A Literature Review

TL;DR

This literature review analyzes 47 frameworks for translating natural language into database queries, highlighting recent trends, categorization, and performance metrics across SQL and NoSQL systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive categorization and evaluation of recent natural language to database query frameworks, updating the state of the art since 2013.

Findings

70% of frameworks target SQL queries

Most frameworks support only English language

NoSQL frameworks constitute 30% of the reviewed systems

Abstract

A Natural Language Interface (NLI) facilitates users to pose queries to retrieve information from a database without using any artificial language such as the Structured Query Language (SQL). Several applications in various domains including healthcare, customer support and search engines, require elaborating structured data having information on text. Moreover, many issues have been explored including configuration complexity, processing of intensive algorithms, and popularity of relational databases, due to which translating natural language to database query has become a secondary area of investigation. The emerging trend of querying systems and speech-enabled interfaces revived natural language to database queries research area., The last survey published on this topic was six years ago in 2013. To best of our knowledge, there is no recent study found which discusses the current state of the art translations frameworks for natural language for structured and non-structured query languages. In this paper, we have reviewed 47 frameworks from 2008 to 2018. Out of 47, 35 were closely relevant to our work. SQL based frameworks have been categorized as statistical, symbolic and connectionist approaches. Whereas, NoSQL based frameworks have been categorized as semantic matching and pattern matching. These frameworks are then reviewed based on their supporting language, scheme of their heuristic rule, interoperability support, dataset scope and their overall performance score. The findings stated that 70% of the work in natural language to database querying has been carried out for SQL, and NoSQL share 15%, 10% and 5% of languages like SPAROL, CYPHER and GREMLIN respectively. It has also been observed that most of the frameworks support English language only.