A mechanism for responding to a natural language query. Linguistic parsing is applied to the natural language query to generate a set of language element(s). One or more of those language elements are mapped to parameters and/or data elements of a parameterized report, which is selected for use in responding to the query based on the mapping. The selection of the parameterized report and/or mapping to the parameterized report may use the schema of the underlying dataset that the parameterized report uses in order to perform more precise mapping and selection. The selected parameterized report is then used to construct structured data that is responsive to the query. For instance, the structured data could include visualizations. In this manner, already existing parameterized reports that were previously used to generated structured data in the form of reports, may again be used in order to respond to natural language queries.