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: 5887
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 6.3728705e-05
Overall Rank: 5,078 | 65.17%
DOI: 10.1145/3318464.3383128

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Fatma Özcan (IBM)
2. Abdul Quamar (IBM)
3. Jaydeep Sen (IBM)
4. Chuan Lei (IBM)
5. Vasilis Efthymiou (IBM)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ozcan_sigmod20,
        title = {{State of the Art and Open Challenges in Natural Language Interfaces to Data}},
        author = {Özcan, Fatma and Quamar, Abdul and Sen, Jaydeep and Lei, Chuan and Efthymiou, Vasilis},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '20},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3318464.3383128},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318464.3383128},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,012	Opportunities for Quantum Acceleration of Databases: Optimization of Queries and Transaction Schedules	2023	VLDB	6.9578554e-05
4,449	From BERT to GPT-3 Codex: Harnessing the Potential of Very Large Language Models for Data Management	2022	VLDB	6.697553e-05
9,870	Natural Language to SQL: State of the Art and Open Problems	2025	VLDB	5.2043672e-05
10,023	A Universal Question-Answering Platform for Knowledge Graphs	2023	SIGMOD	5.1757914e-05
11,737	DBTagger: Multi-Task Learning for Keyword Mapping in NLIDBs Using Bi-Directional Recurrent Neural Networks	2021	VLDB	5.093636e-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
179	Constructing an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Relational Databases	2015	VLDB	0.00026838277
459	ATHENA: An Ontology-Driven System for Natural Language Querying over Relational Data Stores	2016	VLDB	0.00018101318
555	NaLIR: An Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying Relational Databases	2014	SIGMOD	0.00016568053
1,182	SQAK: Doing More with Keywords	2008	SIGMOD	0.00011778765
1,214	SODA: Generating SQL for Business Users	2012	VLDB	0.0001163751
1,839	BANKS: Browsing and Keyword Searching in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	9.6426575e-05
2,412	NaLIX: an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying XML	2005	SIGMOD	8.6124752e-05
2,440	NAUDA: A Cooperative, Natural Language Interface to Relational Databases	1993	SIGMOD	8.5779647e-05
2,778	DBPal: A Learned NL-Interface for Databases	2018	SIGMOD	8.1305875e-05
5,130	Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	6.354484e-05
6,530	Natural Language Querying of Complex Business Intelligence Queries	2019	SIGMOD	5.8500871e-05
7,718	Bootstrapping an End-to-End Natural Language Interface for Databases	2019	SIGMOD	5.5604921e-05
8,987	Constructing Expressive Relational Queries with Dual-Specification Synthesis	2020	CIDR	5.3387464e-05
11,785	An Ontology-Based Conversation System for Knowledge Bases	2020	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,943	Tooling Framework for Instantiating Natural Language Querying System	2018	VLDB	5.093636e-05

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