Natural Language Interfaces to Databases

✍ Scribed by Yunyao Li, Dragomir Radev, Davood Rafiei

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 248
• Series: Synthesis Lectures on Data Management
• Category: Library

✦ Table of Contents

Foreword by the Series Editor
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Overview
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1.1 A Session with ChatGPT
1.2 NLIDBs in the Wild
1.2.1 Language Support
1.2.2 Assisting Query Input
1.2.3 Expressivity
1.2.4 Customizability
1.3 What's Ahead
2 Building an NLIDB: The Basics
2.1 Example Database
2.2 Anatomy of NLIDB
2.3 Building an NLIDB
2.3.1 Query Understanding
2.3.2 Query Translation
2.3.3 External Knowledge
2.3.4 Interaction Generation
2.3.5 Result Generation
2.4 Summary
3 Data and Query Model
3.1 Conceptual Models
3.1.1 Entity-Relationship Model
3.1.2 UML
3.1.3 Ontology
3.2 Relational Model
3.2.1 Relational Query Languages
3.2.2 First-Order Logic
3.2.3 Relational Algebra
3.2.4 SQL
3.3 Graph Model
3.3.1 SPARQL
3.4 Storage and Indexing
3.5 Query Evaluation and Optimization
3.5.1 Query Parsing and Plan Generation
3.5.2 Query Optimizer
3.5.3 Evaluation Engine
3.6 Summary
3.7 Further Reading
4 Text to Data
4.1 Introduction
4.1.1 Natural Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation
4.1.2 Historical Overview
4.1.3 Semantic Parsing
4.2 Meaning Representations
4.2.1 First-Order Logic
4.2.2 Lambda Calculus
4.2.3 Abstract Meaning Representation
4.2.4 Word Embeddings
4.2.5 Semantic Compositionality
4.2.6 Knowledge Graphs and RDF
4.2.7 Syntactic Representations
4.2.8 Combinatory Categorial Grammar
4.3 Converting Sentences to Structured Form
4.3.1 Information Extraction
4.3.2 GeoQuery
4.3.3 Semantic Parsing
4.3.4 Semi-supervised Semantic Parsing
4.4 Neural Semantic Parsing
4.4.1 Sequence-to-Sequence Methods
4.4.2 Applications of Neural Semantic Parsing
4.5 Text-to-SQL
4.5.1 WikiSQL
4.5.2 Dataset Splits
4.5.3 Spider
4.5.4 Extensions to Spider
4.5.5 Selective Recent Papers
4.6 Summary
4.6.1 Further Reading
5 Evaluation
5.1 Methodology Overview
5.2 Datasets and Benchmarks
5.2.1 ATIS
5.2.2 GeoQuery
5.2.3 Scholar
5.2.4 Academic
5.2.5 Advising
5.2.6 IMDB and Yelp
5.2.7 Fiben
5.2.8 WikiSQL
5.2.9 SPIDER
5.2.10 BIRD
5.2.11 Benchmarks Statistics and Query Composition
5.2.12 Other Benchmarks
5.3 Reference-Based Evaluation
5.3.1 Generating a Reference
5.3.2 Candidate Answer Evaluation Based on a Reference
5.3.3 Performance Metrics
5.3.4 Semantic Equivalence
5.4 Human-Centric Evaluation
5.4.1 Expressing and Performing the Tasks
5.4.2 Quality of Generated Queries
5.4.3 Performance in Downstream Tasks
5.5 Other Performance Metrics
5.5.1 Resource Consumption
5.5.2 Query Hardness
5.5.3 Robustness to Noise and Ambiguity
5.5.4 Adaptability to Unseen Databases and Questions
5.6 Top Performing Models
5.6.1 The Models
5.6.2 Large Language Models
5.6.3 Constraining the Decoder
5.7 Further Reading
6 Data-to-Text
6.1 Introduction
6.1.1 Traditional Generation
6.1.2 Data-to-Text Generation
6.1.3 Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) for Text Generation
6.1.4 Neural Generation
6.2 Domain Specific Table-to-Text
6.2.1 SRST
6.2.2 e2e
6.2.3 WebNLG
6.2.4 WikiBio
6.2.5 RotoWire
6.2.6 WikiTableT
6.3 Domain Independent Table-to-Text
6.3.1 ToTTo
6.3.2 DART
6.3.3 FeTaQA
6.3.4 TabFact
6.3.5 LogicNLG
6.3.6 Logic2Text
6.3.7 GEM
6.4 Pretraining for Tables
6.4.1 TURL
6.4.2 TUTA
6.4.3 TAPAS
6.4.4 TaBERT
6.4.5 Grappa
6.4.6 Tabbie
6.4.7 Other Recent Papers
6.5 Summary
7 Interactivity
7.1 Disambiguation
7.1.1 Ambiguity
7.1.2 Spell Correction
7.1.3 Interactive Disambiguation
7.2 Query Suggestion
7.2.1 Auto-Completion
7.2.2 Query Suggestions Beyond Auto-Completion
7.3 Automatic Data Insights
7.3.1 Categorization
7.3.2 Visualization Recommendation
7.4 Explanation
7.5 Conversational Natural Language Interfaces to Databases
7.5.1 Discourse Structure
7.5.2 Discourse Transition
7.5.3 Unidirectional Conversation
7.5.4 Bidirectional Conversation
7.6 Multi-modal Conversational NLIDB
7.6.1 Conversational Transition Modeling
7.6.2 Conversation via Query Suggestion
7.6.3 Discussions
7.7 Summary
7.8 Further Reading
Correction to: Natural Language Interfaces to Databases
Correction to: Y. Li et al., Natural Language Interfaces to Databases, Synthesis Lectures on Data Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45043-3
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