An efficient denotational semantics for natural language database queries

Early work on natural language database query processing focused on theories of compositional semantics. Recent work concentrates on the translation of NL queries to SQL where semantics is primarily used in an ad hoc manner to guide syntactic translation. Here, we argue that there remains a need for an efficiently-implementable denotational semantics for NL DB queries, and show how this can be achieved by integrating a relatively little-known semantics for transitive verbs with a new efficiently-implementable semantics for negation.