Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges

Summary: Survey of natural language data management and NL interfaces to databases, storing NL text in relational DBs and enabling NL-to-SQL interfaces. Key ideas include methods, open challenges, and opportunities to push DBs toward Codd’s rendezvous with NL. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h87956e40752ff732
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2017
Pagerank: 6.2199469e-05
Overall Rank: 5,227 | 64.86%
DOI: 10.1145/3035918.3054783

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Yunyao Li (IBM)
2. Davood Rafiei (University of Alberta)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{li_sigmod17,
        title = {{Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges}},
        author = {Li, Yunyao and Rafiei, Davood},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '17},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3035918.3054783},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3035918.3054783},
        year = {2017}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,120	State of the Art and Open Challenges in Natural Language Interfaces to Data	2020	SIGMOD	6.2651231e-05
5,155	An In-Depth Benchmarking of Text-to-SQL Systems	2021	SIGMOD	6.250495e-05
9,210	Natural Language to SQL: State of the Art and Open Problems	2025	VLDB	5.2061511e-05
10,594	Reliable Answers for Recurring Questions: Boosting Text-to-SQL Accuracy with Template Constrained Decoding	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
12,040	DBTagger: Multi-Task Learning for Keyword Mapping in NLIDBs Using Bi-Directional Recurrent Neural Networks	2021	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
180	Constructing an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Relational Databases	2015	VLDB	0.0002654471
439	ATHENA: An Ontology-Driven System for Natural Language Querying over Relational Data Stores	2016	VLDB	0.00018251249
579	Incremental Knowledge Base Construction Using DeepDive	2015	VLDB	0.00016086569
1,312	Mind Your Grammar: a New Approach to Modelling Text	1987	VLDB	0.0001106293
1,760	Structured Querying of Web Text: A Technical Challenge	2007	CIDR	9.7106555e-05
1,954	Exemplar Queries: Give me an Example of What You Need	2014	VLDB	9.31794e-05
2,286	Join Queries with External Text Sources: Execution and Optimization Techniques	1995	SIGMOD	8.6942645e-05
2,477	A Relational Approach to Incrementally Extracting and Querying Structure in Unstructured Data	2007	VLDB	8.4079432e-05
3,039	Knowledge Expansion over Probabilistic Knowledge Bases	2014	SIGMOD	7.7262528e-05
4,736	Scalable Ad-hoc Entity Extraction from Text Collections	2008	VLDB	6.4451961e-05
7,670	Efficient Indexing and Querying over Syntactically Annotated Trees	2012	VLDB	5.4772833e-05
7,950	A Natural Language Interface for Querying General and Individual Knowledge	2015	VLDB	5.4207861e-05

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