xDBTagger: Explainable Natural Language Interface to Databases Using Keyword Mappings and Schema Graph

Translating natural language queries (NLQ) into structured query language (SQL) in interfaces to relational databases is a challenging task that has been widely studied by researchers from both the database and natural language processing communities. Numerous works have been proposed to attack the natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDB) problem either as a conventional pipeline-based or an end-to-end deep-learning-based solution. Nevertheless, regardless of the approach preferred, such solutions exhibit black-box nature, which makes it difficult for potential users targeted by these systems to comprehend the decisions made to produce the translated SQL. To this end, we propose xDBTagger, an explainable hybrid translation pipeline that explains the decisions made along the way to the user both textually and visually. We also evaluate xDBTagger quantitatively in three real-world relational databases. The evaluation results indicate that in addition to being fully interpretable, xDBTagger is effective in terms of accuracy and translates the queries more efficiently compared to other state-of-the-art pipeline-based systems up to 10000 times.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures. This work is the extended version of arXiv:2101.04226 that appeared in PVLDB'2

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Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their popularity are undeniable for obvious reasons, their engineering is far from simple. In most part, semantics and intent preserving mapping of a well understood natural language query expressed over a structured database schema to a structured query language is still a difficult task, and research to tame the complexity is intense. In this paper, we propose a multi-level knowledge-based middleware to facilitate such mappings that separate the conceptual level from the physical level. We augment these multi-level abstractions with a concept reasoner and a query strategy engine to dynamically link arbitrary natural language querying to well defined structured queries. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting a Datalog based prototype system, called BioSmart, that can compute responses to arbitrary natural language queries over arbitrary databases once a syntactic classification of the natural language query is made

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Recently some researchers in the areas of database data modelling and knowledge representations in artificial intelligence have recognized that they share many common goals. In this survey paper we show the relationship between database and artificial intelligence research. We show that there has been a tendency for data models to incorporate more modelling techniques developed for knowledge representations in artificial intelligence as the desire to incorporate more application oriented semantics, user friendliness, and flexibility has increased. Increasing the semantics of the representation is the key to capturing the "reality" of the database environment, increasing user friendliness, and facilitating the support of multiple, possibly conflicting, user views of the information contained in a database

An introduction to Graph Data Management

A graph database is a database where the data structures for the schema and/or instances are modeled as a (labeled)(directed) graph or generalizations of it, and where querying is expressed by graph-oriented operations and type constructors. In this article we present the basic notions of graph databases, give an historical overview of its main development, and study the main current systems that implement them