In one embodiment, a method includes receiving a search query comprising one or more n-grams from a client system associated with a user of an online social network, generating one or more term embeddings representing the one or more n-grams of the search query, respectively, encoding the one or more term embeddings to generate a query embedding representing the search query, decoding the query embedding to generate one or more output term embeddings representing one or more query tokens, constructing a query command from the one or more output term embeddings, executing the query command to retrieve one or more search results, and sending, to the client system in response to the search query, instructions for generating a search-results interface for presentation to the user, the search-results interface comprising one or more of the retrieved search results.