A principled approach to grammars for controlled natural languages and predictive editors

DOI10.1007/S10849-012-9167-ZMaRDI QIDQ2255208zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Tobias Kuhn

Publication date 9 February 2015

Published in Journal of Logic, Language and Information (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3643

zbMATH Keywords

anaphoric referencesAttempto Controlled Englishchart parsingcontrolled natural languagespredictive editors

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Logic of natural languages (03B65) Natural language processing (68T50) Linguistics (91F20)

Abstract: Controlled natural languages (CNL) with a direct mapping to formal logic have been proposed to improve the usability of knowledge representation systems, query interfaces, and formal specifications. Predictive editors are a popular approach to solve the problem that CNLs are easy to read but hard to write. Such predictive editors need to be able to "look ahead" in order to show all possible continuations of a given unfinished sentence. Such lookahead features, however, are difficult to implement in a satisfying way with existing grammar frameworks, especially if the CNL supports complex nonlocal structures such as anaphoric references. Here, methods and algorithms are presented for a new grammar notation called Codeco, which is specifically designed for controlled natural languages and predictive editors. A parsing approach for Codeco based on an extended chart parsing algorithm is presented. A large subset of Attempto Controlled English (ACE) has been represented in Codeco. Evaluation of this grammar and the parser implementation shows that the approach is practical, adequate and efficient.

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Cites work

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 752501 (Why is no real title available?)
• An efficient context-free parsing algorithm
• Modified Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60
• Tree adjunct grammars

Cited in

(2)

• Designing efficient controlled languages for ontologies
• Specifying and verbalising answer set programs in controlled natural language

Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• AceRules
• YACC
• ALGOL 60

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