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

[Tobias Kuhn]

Hi,

Only hours after the release yesterday, we found a medium-sized bug in the Attempto Parsing Engine: 
Warning messages were returned only for the last paragraph. This is now fixed and a new package of 
APE is available for download. Sorry for the inconvenience.


Tobias


Tobias Kuhn wrote:
> 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
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