EzNL2SQL: A System for Network Devices Management with a Natural Language Interface for Databases

Abstract

To enhance and accelerate the work of network management experts of large IT environments, we present ezNL2SQL. It is a fast and flexible system that provides a natural language interface to a database in a domain-specific setting, where column and table names do not correspond to their underlying entities and a large labelled corpus is not available. Our system comprises three main components: linguistic index, natural language query analyzer and SQL generator, and an easy-to-use UI. Given an input question and a target database, ezNL2SQL generates a valid SQL statement for querying data that best satisfies the information request specified by the question. The result is presented to the user in the most suitable visual format. We demonstrate the usefulness and efficiency of the system in a user study with network management experts and a complex network security inventory database.