# DBTagger: Multi-Task Learning for Keyword Mapping in NLIDBs Using Bi-Directional Recurrent Neural Networks

**Authors:** Arif Usta, Akifhan Karakayali, Özgür Ulusoy  
**arXiv:** [2101.04226](https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04226)  
**Date:** 2021-01-11  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2101.04226v1/

## Key points

- Translating Natural Language Queries (NLQs) to Structured Query Language (SQL) is a challenging task
- Conventional rule-based systems use a pipeline of solutions for each step of the task
- Recent works have focused on translation and overlooked earlier steps
- Keyword mapping is one of the most critical and challenging problems in this pipeline
- The authors propose a novel deep learning-based supervised approach called DBTagger for keyword mapping
- DBTagger utilizes POS tags of NLQs and is an end-to-end and schema-independent solution
- The authors evaluate their approach on eight different datasets and report new state-of-the-art accuracy results with an average accuracy rate of 92.4%
- DBTagger is faster than its counterparts up to 10000 times and scalable for bigger databases

## Summary

The task of translating Natural Language Queries (NLQs) to Structured Query Language (SQL) in interfaces deployed in relational databases is a challenging one, and has been the subject of recent studies in the database community. Conventional rule-based systems utilize a pipeline of solutions to deal with each step of this task, including stop word filtering, tokenization, stemming/lemmatization, parsing, tagging, and translation. However, recent works have focused mainly on the translation step while overlooking earlier steps by using ad-hoc solutions. One of the most critical and challenging problems in this pipeline is keyword mapping - constructing a mapping between tokens in the query and relational database elements such as tables, attributes, values etc. To address this problem, the authors propose a novel deep learning-based supervised approach called DBTagger (DataBase Tagger), which utilizes POS tags of NLQs. They define the keyword mapping problem as a sequence tagging problem and use bi-directional recurrent neural networks for multi-task learning. The proposed approach is an end-to-end and schema-independent solution making it practical for various relational databases. The authors evaluate their approach on eight different datasets and report new state-of-the-art accuracy results with an average accuracy rate of 92.4%. Additionally, they demonstrate that DBTagger is faster than its counterparts up to 10000 times and scalable for bigger databases. Overall, this study presents an innovative solution to the challenging task of translating NLQs into SQL queries by proposing a novel deep learning-based approach that outperforms existing methods while being practical for various relational databases.