Statmuse.com has a really nice implementation of this in their natural-language sport statistics engine. You can see an image here http://i.imgur.com/ukganMx.png
When I first heard of statmuse I had your same question, best I could come up with is "Constructing an Interactive Natural Language Interface for Relational Databases"[1]. If anyone knows more about this I'd be curious to hear about it.
...or if you're in the beta, here: https://www.statmuse.com/nba/search?q=michael%20jordan%20sho...