[Attempto] ACE 6.5 and new releases of APE and the Attempto Java Packages

[Tobias Kuhn]

Hi everyone,

We are releasing version 6.5 of Attempto Controlled English (ACE) and new versions of the Attempto 
Parsing Engine (APE) and the Attempto Java Packages.

Changes of Attempto Controlled English (ACE):

     * ACE provides now modality with modal auxiliaries for recommendation ("should"), and
       admissibility ("may"). These forms of modality can also be expressed by the fixed phrases "it
       is recommended that", respectively "it is admissible that".
     * Declarative sentences, questions and commands can now be arbitrarily mixed. All sentences can
       anaphorically refer to preceding declarative sentences, but not to questions or commands.
     * If in sentence subordination the main sentence and the subordinated sentence have the same
       subject as in "John wants that he sleeps" then this sentence can be more concisely expressed
       as "John wants to sleep".
     * We introduce the notion of paragraphs for ACE texts. An empty line (or a line that contains
       only white spaces) is interpreted as a paragraph break. Anaphoric references are only possible
       within the same paragraph.
     * All verb phrases including the copula can now consistently be modified by adverbs and by
       prepositional phrases. These modifiers can now also precede the verb phrase, for example "John
       directly flies to Zurich.".
     * In order to be more flexible with respect to the many ways plurals can be interpreted, all
       noun phrases with generalised quantifiers are now accessible for anaphoric references. For
       example: "John has at most 2 cars. The cars are expensive."
     * Commands can now contain negation, for example "John, do not touch the machine!".
     * Macros like for example "Proposition X: John waits. It is true that X." have been removed from
       the language.
     * Negated generalized quantifiers like for example "not more than 5" have been removed from the
       language because they are harder to understand than equivalent generalized quantifiers without
       negation (the given example is equivalent to "at most 5").
     * Sentences like "there is X" are now supported and are interpreted as "there is something X"
     * Commands can now use the correct second person pronouns "you", "your", "yourself",
       "yourselves", and "your own".
     * Relative clauses can be used only for nouns, indefinite pronouns and proper names.

Changes of the Attempto Parsing Engine (APE):

     * DRS:
           o Proper names no longer introduce separate conditions in the DRS. Instead, a term of the
             form "named(...)" is introduced for each occurrence of the proper name. For example,
             "John likes Mary" introduces now only one DRS condition: predicate(A, like,
             named('John'), named('Mary')).
           o The modal constructs for recommendation ("should", "it is recommended that") introduce
             nested DRS boxes using the operator "should". In the same way, admissibility ("may", "it
             is admissible that") introduces the operator "may".
           o Questions introduce now nested DRS boxes using the operator "question" and in the same
             way commands use the operator "command".
           o The DRS conditions have now not only a sentence id attached but also a token id that
             points to the position of the token within the sentence.
           o Maximality conditions (e.g. for "at most 5") no longer introduce implications in the DRS
             but use plain Prolog lists to bracket the conditions that are within the scope of the
             maximality.
     * Paraphraser:
           o Some additional forms of that-subordination and questions work now.
     * OWL:
           o Anonymous individuals have now the prefix "Ind" both in XML and in RDF (used to be "I"
             and "id").
           o Less anonymous individuals are created. For example, no anonymous individuals are
             created for "John is a man that is a manager".
           o The auxiliary entities "Superman" and "know" are replaced by "Universe" and "contain".
     * TPTP:
           o APE can now also translate ACE texts into the TPTP format (see http://www.tptp.org).

Changes of the ACE Lexicon Format:

     * Nouns and proper names can now have undefined gender. In this case, non-human (e.g. "it") or
       human (e.g. "her") pronouns can be used.

Changes of the Attempto Java Packages:

     * The Attempto Java Packages contain now the code for the ACE Editor.
     * The ACGN grammar format (that is used for the chart parser and the predictive editor) has been
       replaced by the new format Codeco (COncrete and DEclarative grammar notation for COntrolled
       natural languages). Anaphoric references can now be defined in a fully declarative way. (This
       change is not backwards compatible if you defined your own grammar and/or menu creator with an
       earlier version of the Attempto Java Packages.)
     * The class HeaderControlFilter has been removed. It was a work-around for a bug in Firefox
       3.0.0 to 3.0.4 and now we can assume that nobody uses these versions of Firefox anymore.
     * AceWiki has now client-side support for the export of the ACE lexicon and of the whole
       knowledge base as an ACE text.
     * Comments in AceWiki can now contain wiki-internal links (using double square brackets, e.g.
       "[[country]]") and external links using URLs.

Furthermore, many minor improvements and bug-fixes have been done. The latest versions of APE and 
the Attempto Java Packages can be downloaded from our download page:

     http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/downloads/

Feedback is always appreciated.


Tobias