InteracSPARQL : An Interactive System for SPARQL Query Refinement Using Natural Language Explanations

Xiangru Jian, Zhengyuan Dong, M. Tamer \"Ozsu


Abstract
Current approaches for Natural Language to SPARQL (NL2SPARQL) generation primarily rely on one-turn, training-intensive models. While effective in specific settings, these models often lack generalizability and fail to provide transparency or mechanisms for error recovery in realistic scenarios. Additionally, prior interactive works are largely outdated and incompatible with modern large language model (LLM) workflows. In this paper, we introduce InteracSPARQL, a training-free interactive refinement pipeline that acts as a plug-and-play enhancement for existing SPARQL generation systems. Our approach integrates a set of efficient entity and property lookup tools within a self-correction loop, guided by a novel hybrid Natural Language Explanation (NLE) module. This module combines rule-based Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) parsing with LLM semantic enrichment to produce explanations that are both structurally accurate and linguistically fluent. We evaluate InteracSPARQL on standard benchmarks (QALD-9 and QALD-10), showing that our tool-augmented self-refinement significantly boosts the accuracy of base models without fine-tuning. Furthermore, human evaluation confirms that our structured explanations substantially improve user understanding and ability to correct queries compared to unstructured baselines.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1480
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
29599–29624
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1480/
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Cite (ACL):
Xiangru Jian, Zhengyuan Dong, and M. Tamer \"Ozsu. 2026. InteracSPARQL : An Interactive System for SPARQL Query Refinement Using Natural Language Explanations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 29599–29624, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
InteracSPARQL : An Interactive System for SPARQL Query Refinement Using Natural Language Explanations (Jian et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1480.pdf
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