On the transformation of sentences with genitive relations to SQL queries

The genitive relation is one of the most complex semantic structures, since it could express wide range of different connection types between entities, even in a single language. Thus, transformation of its syntactic form to a formal computer language is far from clear. In the last decade, several natural language database interfaces (NLIDBs) have been proposed, however, a detailed or a general description of this problem is still missing in the literature. In this paper, we present a general solution for translating genitive phrases into SQL queries which contains both language dependent and language independent parts. Our solution is optimized and tested for Hungarian, however, most of the work can be easily adopted for other languages as well. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.