@inproceedings{khabiri-etal-2025-declarative,
    title = "Declarative Techniques for {NL} Queries over Heterogeneous Data",
    author = "Khabiri, Elham  and
      Kephart, Jeffrey O.  and
      Iii, Fenno F. Heath  and
      Jayaraman, Srideepika  and
      Li, Yingjie  and
      Tipu, Fateh A.  and
      Shah, Dhruv  and
      Fokoue, Achille  and
      Bhamidipaty, Anu",
    editor = "Potdar, Saloni  and
      Rojas-Barahona, Lina  and
      Montella, Sebastien",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou (China)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.123/",
    pages = "1744--1761",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-333-3",
    abstract = "In many industrial settings, users wish to ask questions in natural language, the answers to which require assembling information from diverse structured data sources. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), applications can now translate natural language questions into a set of API calls or database calls, execute them, and combine the results into an appropriate natural language response. However, these applications remain impractical in realistic industrial settings because they do not cope with the data source heterogeneity that typifies such environments. In this work, we simulate the heterogeneity of real industry settings by introducing two extensions of the popular Spider benchmark dataset that require a combination of database and API calls. Then, we introduce a declarative approach to handling such data heterogeneityand demonstrate that it copes with data source heterogeneity significantly better than state-of-the-art LLM-based agentic or imperative code generation systems. Our augmented benchmarks are available to the research community."
}