The disclosed subject matter relates to a system and method for providing an automated assistant that retrieves information from a knowledge base in response to a user's natural language question. A user's natural language question voice is transformed into an intermediate representation. From the intermediate representation, a cypher query is generated which may be used to query the database. The query results are provided in response to the user. The transformation into the intermediate representation is database independent while the cypher query is dependent upon the database queried.