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Though recent advances in machine learning have led to significant improvements in natural language interfaces for databases, the accuracy and reliability of these systems remain limited, especially in high-stakes domains. This paper introduces SQLucid, a novel user interface that bridges the gap between non-expert users and complex database querying processes. SQLucid addresses existing limitations by integrating visual correspondence, intermediate query results, and editable step-by-step SQL explanations in natural language to facilitate user understanding and engagement. This unique blend of features empowers users to understand and refine SQL queries easily and precisely. Two user studies and one quantitative experiment were conducted to validate SQLucid’s effectiveness, showing significant improvement in task completion accuracy and user confidence compared to existing interfaces. Our code is available at https://github.com/magic-YuanTian/SQLucid.
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This content will become publicly available on October 1, 2025
SketchQL: Video Moment Querying with a Visual Query Interface
Localizing video moments based on the movement patterns of objects is an important task in video analytics. Existing video analytics systems offer two types of querying interfaces based on natural language and SQL, respectively. However, both types of interfaces have major limitations. SQL-based systems require high query specification time, whereas natural language-based systems require large training datasets to achieve satisfactory retrieval accuracy. To address these limitations, we present SketchQL, a video database management system (VDBMS) for offline, exploratory video moment retrieval that is both easy to use and generalizes well across multiple video moment datasets. To improve ease-of-use, SketchQL features avisual query interfacethat enables users to sketch complex visual queries through intuitive drag-and-drop actions. To improve generalizability, SketchQL operates on object-tracking primitives that are reliably extracted across various datasets using pre-trained models. We present a learned similarity search algorithm for retrieving video moments closely matching the user's visual query based on object trajectories. SketchQL trains the model on a diverse dataset generated with a novel simulator, that enhances its accuracy across a wide array of datasets and queries. We evaluate SketchQL on four real-world datasets with nine queries, demonstrating its superior usability and retrieval accuracy over state-of-the-art VDBMSs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2335881
- PAR ID:
- 10574924
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for Computing Machinery
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2836-6573
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 27
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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