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NaLIR: an interactive natural language interface for querying relational databases

Published: 18 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In this demo, we present NaLIR, a generic interactive natural language interface for querying relational databases. NaLIR can accept a logically complex English language sentence as query input. This query is first translated into a SQL query, which may include aggregation, nesting, and various types of joins, among other things, and then evaluated against an RDBMS. In this demonstration, we show that NaLIR, while far from being able to pass the Turing test, is perfectly usable in practice, and able to handle even quite complex queries in a variety of application domains. In addition, we also demonstrate how carefully designed interactive communication can avoid misinterpretation with minimum user burden.

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  • (2024)The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready?Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3681954.368200317:11(3318-3331)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2024
  • (2024)SQLucid: Grounding Natural Language Database Queries with Interactive ExplanationsProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676368(1-20)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
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  1. NaLIR: an interactive natural language interface for querying relational databases

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGMOD '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
    June 2014
    1645 pages
    ISBN:9781450323765
    DOI:10.1145/2588555
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 18 June 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. natural language interface
    2. relational database
    3. usability

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    SIGMOD/PODS'14
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    SIGMOD '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 421 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 785 of 4,003 submissions, 20%

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)Generating Succinct Descriptions of Database Schemata for Cost-Efficient Prompting of Large Language ModelsProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3681954.368201717:11(3511-3523)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2024
    • (2024)The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready?Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3681954.368200317:11(3318-3331)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2024
    • (2024)SQLucid: Grounding Natural Language Database Queries with Interactive ExplanationsProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676368(1-20)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2024)DreamCodeVR: Towards Democratizing Behavior Design in Virtual Reality with Speech-Driven Programming2024 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)10.1109/VR58804.2024.00078(579-589)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Understanding the Performance of Large Language Model to Generate SQL Queries2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00048(359-361)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Large Language Models: Principles and Practice2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00404(5354-5357)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024)PURPLE: Making a Large Language Model a Better SQL Writer2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00009(15-28)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024)Combining computational linguistics with sentence embedding to create a zero-shot NLIDBArray10.1016/j.array.2024.10036824(100368)Online publication date: Dec-2024
    • (2024)Multilingual spatial domain natural language interface to databasesGeoinformatica10.1007/s10707-023-00496-328:1(29-52)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
    • (2024)SEREIA: document store exploration through keywordsKnowledge and Information Systems10.1007/s10115-024-02151-166:10(6101-6132)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
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