Interactivity

In this chapter, we discuss the top of interactivity, a key element of NLIDB impacting its effectiveness and usefulness. We introduce different dimensions of interactivity, present the corresponding techniques to support each dimension in detail, and discuss their benefits and corresponding challenges. We first focus on interactivity at query time and discuss methods for query disambiguation and query suggestions. We then switch focus to interactivity after the initial query and discuss automatic data insights and explanation techniques for different aspects of NLIDBs. Finally, we present how different interactive techniques discussed in the chapter may be combined together to provide conversational NLIDBs and multi-modal NLIDBs where user input is beyond natural language.