Methods, systems, and devices supporting primitive-based query generation are described. A database system may receive a natural language query associated with a subset of data sets stored at the database system, determine a set of tokens included in the natural language query, and label one or more tokens of the set of tokens with one or more primitives from a set of supported primitives associated with the subset of data sets. The database system may determine a set of higher order concepts corresponding to query operations, query conditions, or both based on the one or more labeled tokens. The database system may train a neural network to learn a grammatical structure of the natural language query and generate a database query for querying the database system based on the one or more labeled tokens, the set of higher order concepts, and the neural network.