Systems and methods for natural language question answering are described. For example, methods may include determining a set of candidate database queries, including respective sequences of tokens of a database syntax, based on a string; determining a first score for a first candidate database query from the set of candidate database queries, wherein the first score is based on a match between one or more words of the string and a token of the respective sequence of tokens of the first candidate database query; determining a second score for the first candidate database query, wherein the second score is based on natural language syntax data determined for words of the string; selecting, based on the first score and the second score, the first candidate database query from the set of candidate database queries; and invoking a search of the database using the first candidate database query to obtain search results.