Text2Cypher: Bridging Natural Language and Graph Databases

Makbule Gulcin Ozsoy, Leila Messallem, Jon Besga, Gianandrea Minneci


Abstract
Knowledge graphs use nodes, relationships, and properties to represent arbitrarily complex data. When stored in a graph database, the Cypher query language enables efficient modeling and querying of knowledge graphs. However, using Cypher requires specialized knowledge, which can present a challenge for non-expert users. Our work Text2Cypher aims to bridge this gap by translating natural language queries into Cypher query language and extending the utility of knowledge graphs to non-technical expert users. While large language models (LLMs) can be used for this purpose, they often struggle to capture complex nuances, resulting in incomplete or incorrect outputs. Fine-tuning LLMs on domain-specific datasets has proven to be a more promising approach, but the limited availability of high-quality, publicly available Text2Cypher datasets makes this challenging. In this work, we show how we combined, cleaned and organized several publicly available datasets into a total of 44,387 instances, enabling effective fine-tuning and evaluation. Models fine-tuned on this dataset showed significant performance gains, with improvements in Google-BLEU and Exact Match scores over baseline models, highlighting the importance of high-quality datasets and fine-tuning in improving Text2Cypher performance.
Anthology ID:
2025.genaik-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Generative AI and Knowledge Graphs (GenAIK)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Genet Asefa Gesese, Harald Sack, Heiko Paulheim, Albert Merono-Penuela, Lihu Chen
Venues:
GenAIK | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
100–108
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.genaik-1.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Makbule Gulcin Ozsoy, Leila Messallem, Jon Besga, and Gianandrea Minneci. 2025. Text2Cypher: Bridging Natural Language and Graph Databases. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Generative AI and Knowledge Graphs (GenAIK), pages 100–108, Abu Dhabi, UAE. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text2Cypher: Bridging Natural Language and Graph Databases (Ozsoy et al., GenAIK 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.genaik-1.11.pdf