Classification of attributes in a natural language query into different SQL clauses

Abstract

Attribute information in a natural language query is one of the key features for converting a natural language query into a Structured Query Language1 (SQL) in Natural Language Interface to Database systems. In this paper, we explore the task of classifying the attributes present in a natural language query into different SQL clauses in a SQL query. In particular, we investigate the effectiveness of various features and Conditional Random Fields for this task. Our system uses a statistical classifier trained on manually prepared data. We report our results on three different domains and also show how our system can be used for generating a complete SQL query.