I have a column that stores paragraphs with multiple sentences and I am using the "Near" statement to look for the right record. However, is it possible to bound the near statement that only look for words within the same sentences.

For example:

Paragraph

"An elderly man has died as a result of coronavirus in the Royal Hobart Hospital overnight. It follows the death of a woman in her 80s in the North West Regional Hospital in Burnie on Monday morning, and brings the national toll to 19. "

indextype is ctxsys.context

select score(1) from tbl where contains(Paragraph, 'Near (coronavirus, death),20,false)',1) > 0

The result I want is nothing as both words is from a different sentences. However, now it will return me a positive number as both words are less than 20 words apart.

Can you share me some idea on how to do this?

Thanks in advance!

The query should look like this:

select score(1) 
from   tbl
where  contains(Paragraph, 'Near (coronavirus, death),20,false) 
                            WITHIN SENTENCE',1) > 0
;

That is - use the WITHIN operator.

Note that you must tell the index to recognize sentences first. That is: if you created the index with a statement like this:

create index ctxidx on tbl(Paragraph)
indextype is ctxsys.context
-- parameters(' ... ')
;

where the parameters (if you used that clause) don't say anything about "sentences", you will get an error if you try the query above - something along the lines of

DRG-10837: section sentence does not exist

First you will have to define "special" sections for sentences:

begin 
  ctx_ddl.create_section_group('my_section_group', 'AUTO_SECTION_GROUP');
  ctx_ddl.add_special_section('my_section_group', 'SENTENCE');
end;
/

With this in hand:

drop index ctxidx;

create index ctxidx on tbl(Paragraph)
indextype is ctxsys.context
parameters ('section group my_section_group')
;

Now you are ready to successfully run the query at the top of this Answer.