A method (and structure and computer product) of machine translation for processing input questions includes receiving, in a processor on a computer, an input question presented in a natural language. The input question is preprocessed to find one or more condition values for possible Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. One or more possible SQL queries are enumerated based on the one or more found condition values and a paraphrasing model is used to rank the enumerated SQL queries. The highest ranked SQL query is executed against a relational database to search for a response to the input question.