Abstract: 

This talk focuses on the topic of querying industry-grade big data systems. Enterprises have vast amounts of information spread across structured data stores (relational databases, data warehouses, etc.). Descriptive analytics over this data is limited to experts familiar with complex querying languages (e.g., Structured Query Language) as well as metadata and schema associated with such large datastores. The ability to convert natural language questions to SQL statements would make descriptive analytics and reporting much easier and widespread. The problem of automatically converting natural language questions to SQL is well studied, viz., Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB). We present our work on an end-to-end (E2E) system focused on NLIDB.

We describe two main aspects of E2E NLIDB systems: i) Converting natural language to structured language and ii) understanding natural language. There is a plenitude of applications of such E2E systems across domains e.g., healthcare, finance, logistics, etc.

Bio: 

Piyush Arora is a Research Scientist with American Express AI Labs, Bangalore, India since September 2019. Before joining American Express,  he was a Post-Doctoral researcher with the ADAPT Centre, Dublin, Ireland. He completed a Ph.D. in computer science in August 2018 from Dublin City University, Ireland. 
His areas of interest are Information Extraction and Retrieval, Machine Learning, User Search Behavior, Natural Language Processing, Sentiment Analysis, and Deep Learning.
During his Ph.D., he worked in the area of Interactive Information Retrieval, towards developing novel solutions for improving the overall search experience and user learning.  Mainly focused on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques and tools and their application for different tasks, domains, and languages.
He is interested in learning and exploring more on how to use technology to bring changes at the root level, especially focusing on education and human learning, how can we make better societies and ecosystem with the use of technology. He believes "Guided Technology" can play an important role in the path towards a global sustainable world.