Salesforce is using AI to democratize SQL so anyone can query databases in natural language

SQL is about as easy as it gets in the world of programming, and yet its learning curve is still steep enough to prevent many people from interacting with relational databases. Salesforce's AI research team took it upon itself to explore how machine learning might be able to open doors for those without knowledge of SQL. Their recent paper, Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning, builds on sequence to sequence models typically employed in machine translation. A reinforcement learning twist allowed the team to obtain promising results translating natural language database queries into SQL. In practice this means that you could simply ask who the winningest team in college football is and an appropriate database could be automatically queried to tell you that it is in fact the University of Michigan.