[Attempto] combining sentences by temporal prepositions

[Marco Luca Sbodio]

Thank you for answering my questions. I wonder if you know of any
Controlled Natural Language that addresses also combination of sentences
by temporal prepositions. I'm doing some research on this topic, and I
would like to review/assess existing works.

Thank you in advance.

Best Regards,
marco

On 07/07/2009 19:52, Norbert E. Fuchs wrote:
> On 7 Jul 2009, at 16:36, Marco Luca Sbodio wrote:
> 
>> I'm new to Attempto, and I hope not to make too obvious questions.
> 
> You are always welcome to ask questions.
> 
>> I've
>> read part of the available documentation, and I've tried the on-line
>> ACEEditor (which is very nice, btw). However, it is not clear to me
>> if/how Attempto allows a user to combine sentence by temporal
>> prepositions such as "before", "after", "while".
>>
>> Some examples:
>>
>> after X reads D, X sends D to Y
>>
>> before X sends D to Y, X must read D
>>
>> while X reads D, X can modify D
>>
>> As far as I unduerstood, ACE does not allow a user to express the  
>> above
>> sentences. Am I correct?
> 
> Yes, you are correct. Some time ago we considered implementing  
> temporal operators but we never did.
> 
>> I found an old ACE Language Manual (Version 3.0, August 1999) [1], in
>> which there is a section "Time, Events and States", saying that:
>>
>> [[
>> A future version of ACE will allow users to combine sentences by
>> temporal prepositions like before, after, and while.
>> ]]
> 
> This was the time of our "considering" - 10 years ago.
> 
>> However, I cannot find evidence in the current documentation that this
>> has happened. Can you tell me what is the status?
> 
> Currently, there are no temporal operators. One researcher used ACE  
> for signal processing and expressed temporality by prepositional  
> phrases, for instance "... at a time T." Combining this with  
> constructs like "... > ..." you can simulate  before, after and while.
> 
> Best regards.
> 
>     --- nef
> 
>