PhD course: Natural Language Interfaces to Data

From October 15 to 17, in the meeting room at the first floor of the MO27 building (DIEF), Prof. Georgia Koutrika (Athena Research Center) will lecture the course on "Natural Language Interfaces to Data".

This is a regular course of the PhD school and attendance is warmly recommended. Passing the final exam will award you 3 CFD.

The course encompasses 12 hours and is composed of three lectures (from 9am to 1pm). Online attendance is also possible for external audience.

Outline:

  1. Text-to-SQL
    • The Text-to-SQL problem
    • Benchmarks
    • A Taxonomy for Deep Learning Text-to-SQL Systems
    • Key Systems
    • Research Challenges
  2. SQL-to-Text
    • The SQL-to-Text problem
    • Challenges
    • Key Systems
    • Research Challenges
  3. Data-to-Text
    • What is Data-to-Text
    • Subfields of Data-to-Text
    • Table-to-Text

Program:

In the age of the Digital Revolution, almost all human activities, from industrial and business operations to medical and academic research, are reliant on the constant integration and utilisation of ever-increasing volumes of data. However, the explosive volume and complexity of data makes data querying and exploration challenging even for experts, and makes the need to democratise the access to data, even for non-technical users, all the more evident. It is time to lift all technical barriers, by empowering users to access relational databases through conversation. We consider 3 main research areas that a natural language data interface is based on: Text-to-SQL, SQL-to-Text, and Data-to-Text. The purpose of this tutorial is a deep dive into these areas, covering state-of-the-art techniques and models, and explaining how the progress in the deep learning field has led to impressive advancements. We will present benchmarks that sparked research and competition, and discuss open problems and research opportunities with one of the most important challenges being the integration of these 3 research areas into one conversational system.

We kindly ask to fill the form if you are interested in participating.