On the Transformation of Sentences with Genitive Relations to SQL Queries

In our ongoing project called “In the Web of Words” (WoW) we aimed to create a complex search interface that incorporates a deep web search engine module based on a Hungarian question processor. One of the most crucial part of the system was the transformation of genitive relations to adequate SQL queries, since e.g. questions begin with “Who” and “What” mostly contain such a relation. 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 describe how to translate genitive phrases into SQL queries in general, i.e. we omit Hungarian-dependent optimizations.