A Natural Language Interface for Efficient Data Retrieval in SDSS

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Tamhane, Prathamesh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tamhane, Prathamesh
author_facet Tamhane, Prathamesh
contents Modern astronomical surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) provide extensive astronomical databases enabling researchers to access vast amount of diverse data. However, retrieving data from archives requires knowledge of query languages and familiarity with their schema, which presents a barrier for non-experts. This work investigates the use of Microsoft Phi-2, a compact yet powerful transformer-based language model, fine-tuned on natural language--SQL pairs constructed from SDSS query examples. We develop an interface that translates user queries in natural language into SQL commands compatible with SDSS SkyServer. Preliminary evaluation shows that the fine-tuned model produces syntactically valid and largely semantically correct queries across a variety of astronomy-related requests. Our results show that even small-scale models, when carefully fine-tuned, can provide effective domain-specific natural language interfaces for large scientific databases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_25953
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Natural Language Interface for Efficient Data Retrieval in SDSS
Tamhane, Prathamesh
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Modern astronomical surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) provide extensive astronomical databases enabling researchers to access vast amount of diverse data. However, retrieving data from archives requires knowledge of query languages and familiarity with their schema, which presents a barrier for non-experts. This work investigates the use of Microsoft Phi-2, a compact yet powerful transformer-based language model, fine-tuned on natural language--SQL pairs constructed from SDSS query examples. We develop an interface that translates user queries in natural language into SQL commands compatible with SDSS SkyServer. Preliminary evaluation shows that the fine-tuned model produces syntactically valid and largely semantically correct queries across a variety of astronomy-related requests. Our results show that even small-scale models, when carefully fine-tuned, can provide effective domain-specific natural language interfaces for large scientific databases.
title A Natural Language Interface for Efficient Data Retrieval in SDSS
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25953