VeriMinder: Mitigating Analytical Vulnerabilities in NL2SQL

Shubham Mohole, Sainyam Galhotra


Abstract
Application systems using natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs) have democratized data analysis. This positive development has also brought forth an urgent challenge to help users who might use these systems without a background in statistical analysis to formulate bias-free analytical questions. Although significant research has focused on text-to-SQL generation accuracy, addressing cognitive biases in analytical questions remains underexplored. We present [VeriMinder](https://veriminder.ai), an interactive system for detecting and mitigating such analytical vulnerabilities. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a contextual semantic mapping framework for biases relevant to specific analysis contexts (2) an analytical framework that operationalizes the Hard-to-Vary principle and guides users in systematic data analysis (3) an optimized LLM-powered system that generates high-quality, task-specific prompts using a structured process involving multiple candidates, critic feedback, and self-reflection.User testing confirms the merits of our approach. In direct user experience evaluation, 82.5% participants reported positively impacting the quality of the analysis. In comparative evaluation, VeriMinder scored significantly higher than alternative approaches, at least 20% better when considered for metrics of the analysis’s concreteness, comprehensiveness, and accuracy. Our system, implemented as a web application, is set to help users avoid “wrong question” vulnerability during data analysis. VeriMinder [code base](https://reproducibility.link/veriminder) with prompts is available as an MIT-licensed open-source software to facilitate further research and adoption within the community.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-demo.43
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Pushkar Mishra, Smaranda Muresan, Tao Yu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
448–459
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-demo.43/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shubham Mohole and Sainyam Galhotra. 2025. VeriMinder: Mitigating Analytical Vulnerabilities in NL2SQL. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), pages 448–459, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VeriMinder: Mitigating Analytical Vulnerabilities in NL2SQL (Mohole & Galhotra, ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-demo.43.pdf
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 2025.acl-demo.43.copyright_agreement.pdf