Embodiments described herein provide a mechanism that translates a natural language question to a database query format that may be applied to a data table to generate an answer to the natural language question. The system may identify key terms from a natural language question and classify the key terms as variable names or operation names. The natural language question is than translated into a format of question template containing variable names and operation names. In this way, the system may map the template question to a database query which can be applied to operate on a relational database to identify a cell value that represents an answer to the natural language question.