NaLIR: An Interactive Natural Language Interface for Querying Relational Databases

In this demo, we present NaLIR, a generic interactive natural language interface for querying relational databases. NaLIR can accept a logically complex English language sentence as query input. This query is first translated into a SQL query, which may include aggregation, nesting, and various types of joins, among other things, and then evaluated against an RDBMS. In this demonstration, we show that NaLIR, while far from being able to pass the Turing test, is perfectly usable in practice, and able to handle even quite complex queries in a variety of application domains. In addition, we also demonstrate how carefully designed interactive communication can avoid misinterpretation with minimum user burden.