IEEE Access (Jan 2019)

NADAQ: Natural Language Database Querying Based on Deep Learning

  • Boyan Xu,
  • Ruichu Cai,
  • Zhenjie Zhang,
  • Xiaoyan Yang,
  • Zhifeng Hao,
  • Zijian Li,
  • Zhihao Liang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2904720
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7
pp. 35012 – 35017

Abstract

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The high complexity behind SQL language and database schemas has made database querying a challenging task to human programmers. In this paper, we present our new natural language database querying (NADAQ) system as an alternative solution, by designing new translation models smoothly fusing deep learning and traditional database parsing techniques. On top of the popular encoder-decoder model for machine translation, NADAQ injects new dimensions of schema-aware bits associated with the input words into encoder phase and adds new hidden memory neurons controlled by the finite state machine for grammatical state tracking into the decoder phase. We further develop new techniques to enable the augmented neural network to reject queries irrelevant to the contents of the target database and recommend candidate queries reversely transformed into natural language. NADAQ performs well on real-world database systems over human labeled workload, returning query results at 90% accuracy.

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