This paper proposes a technique to generate single sentence natural language descriptions for a wide class of relational database queries. Such a capability meets an important need in the area of cooperative information systems.
The approach to describing queries is phrasal and is restricted to tuple relational queries using positive or negatively signed sequences of existential quantifiers over conjunctions of conditions. Query containment and equivalence are decidable for this class and this property is exploited in the maintenance and use of the phrasal
lexicon.