ATHENA: An Ontology-Driven System for Natural Language Querying over Relational Data Stores
Summary: ATHENA: ontology-driven NLQ over relational stores. A two-stage NLQ→OQL→SQL pipeline decouples semantic view from physical schema; ontology-driven reasoning yields 100% precision on GEO/MAS and 99% on FIN with ~88% recall across workloads. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Diptikalyan Saha (IBM)
- 2. Avrilia Floratou (IBM)
- 3. Karthik Sankaranarayanan (IBM)
- 4. Umar Farooq Minhas (IBM)
- 5. Ashish R. Mittal (IBM)
- 6. Fatma Özcan (IBM)
BibTeX Citation
@article{saha_vldb16,
title = {{ATHENA: An Ontology-Driven System for Natural Language Querying over Relational Data Stores}},
author = {Saha, Diptikalyan and Floratou, Avrilia and Sankaranarayanan, Karthik and Minhas, Umar Farooq and Mittal, Ashish R. and Özcan, Fatma},
journal = {PVLDB},
series = {{VLDB} '16},
volume = {9},
number = {12},
pages = {1209--1220},
doi = {10.14778/2994509.2994536},
url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2994509.2994536},
year = {2016}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 44 of 44 citing papers.
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 38 | DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases | 2002 | VLDB | 0.00047373961 |
| 180 | Constructing an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Relational Databases | 2015 | VLDB | 0.00026541021 |
| 1,183 | SQAK: Doing More with Keywords | 2008 | SIGMOD | 0.0001161406 |
| 1,221 | SODA: Generating SQL for Business Users | 2012 | VLDB | 0.00011469979 |
| 1,920 | QUEST: A Keyword Search System for Relational Data based on Semantic and Machine Learning Techniques | 2013 | VLDB | 9.3737796e-05 |
| 2,452 | NaLIX: an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying XML | 2005 | SIGMOD | 8.4419506e-05 |
| 2,463 | NAUDA: A Cooperative, Natural Language Interface to Relational Databases | 1993 | SIGMOD | 8.425909e-05 |
| 2,472 | Keyword++: A Framework to Improve Keyword Search Over Entity Databases | 2010 | VLDB | 8.410222e-05 |
| 4,308 | Exploratory Keyword Search with Interactive Input | 2015 | SIGMOD | 6.6720785e-05 |
| 5,201 | Extending Practical Pre-Aggregation in On-Line Analytical Processing | 1999 | VLDB | 6.230103e-05 |
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