LANTERN: Boredom-conscious Natural Language Description Generation of Query Execution Plans for Database Education

Abstract

The database systems course in an undergraduate computer science degree program is gaining increasing importance due to the continuous supply of database-related jobs as well as the rise of Data Science. A key learning goal of learners taking such a course is to understand how SQL queries are executed in an RDBMS in practice. An RDBMS typically exposes a query execution plan (QEP) in a visual or textual format, which describes the execution steps for a given query. However, it is often daunting for a learner to comprehend these QEPs containing vendor-specific implementation details. In this demonstration, we present a novel, generic, and portable system called LANTERN that generates a natural language (NL)-based description of the execution strategy chosen by the underlying RDBMS to process a query. It provides a declarative framework called POOL for subject matter experts (SME) to efficiently create and manipulate the NL descriptions of physical operators of any RDBMS. It then exploits POOL to generate the NL descriptions of QEPs by integrating a rule-based and a deep learning-based techniques to infuse language variability in the descriptions. Such an NL generation strategy mitigates the impact of boredom on learners caused by repeated exposure of similar text generated by a rule-based system.