State of the Art and Open Challenges in Natural Language Interfaces to Data

Summary: Tutorial-style survey of natural language interfaces to data, from rule-based extraction to holistic neural interpretation, spanning single-table to multi-join BI queries. Highlights open challenges in interpretation accuracy, scalability, and schema mapping; a concise state-of-the-art reference for researchers. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5825
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 5.5896272e-05
Overall Rank: 5,281 | 63.27%
DOI: 10.1145/3318464.3383128

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,145	Opportunities for Quantum Acceleration of Databases: Optimization of Queries and Transaction Schedules	2023	VLDB	7.4781724e-05
4,934	From BERT to GPT-3 Codex: Harnessing the Potential of Very Large Language Models for Data Management	2022	VLDB	5.8198826e-05
9,875	A Universal Question-Answering Platform for Knowledge Graphs	2023	SIGMOD	4.2667743e-05
10,837	Natural Language to SQL: State of the Art and Open Problems	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,540	DBTagger: Multi-Task Learning for Keyword Mapping in NLIDBs Using Bi-Directional Recurrent Neural Networks	2021	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
206	Constructing an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Relational Databases	2015	VLDB	0.00034667032
535	ATHENA: An Ontology-Driven System for Natural Language Querying over Relational Data Stores	2016	VLDB	0.00020727678
567	NaLIR: An Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying Relational Databases	2014	SIGMOD	0.00019966681
1,153	SQAK: Doing More with Keywords	2008	SIGMOD	0.00013642866
1,168	SODA: Generating SQL for Business Users	2012	VLDB	0.00013541143
1,972	BANKS: Browsing and Keyword Searching in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	9.8916725e-05
2,271	NAUDA: A Cooperative, Natural Language Interface to Relational Databases	1993	SIGMOD	9.1379042e-05
2,313	NaLIX: an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying XML	2005	SIGMOD	9.0497076e-05
2,816	DBPal: A Learned NL-Interface for Databases	2018	SIGMOD	8.0694738e-05
5,455	Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	5.4977219e-05
6,762	Natural Language Querying of Complex Business Intelligence Queries	2019	SIGMOD	4.9345125e-05
7,721	Bootstrapping an End-to-End Natural Language Interface for Databases	2019	SIGMOD	4.6683091e-05
8,802	Constructing Expressive Relational Queries with Dual-Specification Synthesis	2020	CIDR	4.4480274e-05
11,590	An Ontology-Based Conversation System for Knowledge Bases	2020	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
11,737	Tooling Framework for Instantiating Natural Language Querying System	2018	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

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206	Constructing an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Relational Databases	2015	VLDB	0.00034667032
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5,455	Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	5.4977219e-05
10,837	Natural Language to SQL: State of the Art and Open Problems	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
6,826	Natural Language Interfaces for Databases with Deep Learning	2023	VLDB	4.9142824e-05