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Translating synthetic natural language to database queries with a polyglot deep learning framework

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Change log

Authors

Bazaga, Adrián 
Gunwant, Nupur 
Micklem, Gos 

Abstract

Abstract: The number of databases as well as their size and complexity is increasing. This creates a barrier to use especially for non-experts, who have to come to grips with the nature of the data, the way it has been represented in the database, and the specific query languages or user interfaces by which data are accessed. These difficulties worsen in research settings, where it is common to work with many different databases. One approach to improving this situation is to allow users to pose their queries in natural language. In this work we describe a machine learning framework, Polyglotter, that in a general way supports the mapping of natural language searches to database queries. Importantly, it does not require the creation of manually annotated data for training and therefore can be applied easily to multiple domains. The framework is polyglot in the sense that it supports multiple different database engines that are accessed with a variety of query languages, including SQL and Cypher. Furthermore Polyglotter supports multi-class queries. Good performance is achieved on both toy and real databases, as well as a human-annotated WikiSQL query set. Thus Polyglotter may help database maintainers make their resources more accessible.

Description

Keywords

Article, /639/705/117, /639/705/794, article

Journal Title

Scientific Reports

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2045-2322

Volume Title

11

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group UK
Sponsorship
Wellcome Trust (208381)
Innovate UK (KTP011266)