Explaining Structured Queries in Natural Language

Many applications offer a form-based environment for naive users for accessing databases without being familiar with the database schema or a structured query language. User interactions are translated to structured queries and executed. However, as a user is unlikely to know the underlying semantic connections among the fields presented in a form, it is often useful to provide her with a textual explanation of the query. In this paper, we take a graph-based approach to the query translation problem. We represent various forms of structured queries as directed graphs and we annotate the graph edges with template labels using an extensible template mechanism. We present different graph traversal strategies for efficiently exploring these graphs and composing textual query descriptions. Finally, we present experimental results for the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed methods.