[Attempto] Draft paper for discussion

[Adam Wyner]

Dear Colleagues,

I have posted a recently submitted, draft paper to my blog in which we
use ACE to translate several policy-making statements to FOL.  The
title, link, and abstract are below.  Most relevant (we think) is the
discussion of the issues we encountered in refining the syntactic form
to yield the desired semantic interpretation.  It suggests that further
guidance is needed in this important area.  This is an 'applied' paper
along the lines of recent work by Shiffman et al. "Writing Clinical
Practice Guidelines in Controlled Natural Language". 
Comments are very welcome.

>From Policy-making Statements to First-order Logic

http://wyner.info/research/Papers/WynerVanEngersBahreini2010.pdf

Adam Wyner, Tom van Engers, and Kiavash Bahreini
Submitted to eGOVIS 2010

Abstract
Within a framework for enriched on-line discussion forums for
e-government policy-making, pro and con statements for positions are
input, structurally related, then logically represented and evaluated.
The framework builds on current technologies for multi-threaded
discussion, natural language processing, ontologies, and formal
argumentation frameworks. This paper focuses on the natural language
processing of statements in the framework. A small sample policy
discussion is presented. We adopt and apply a controlled natural
language (Attempto Controlled English) to constrain the domain of
discourse, eliminate ambiguity and unclarity, allow a logical
representation of statements which supports inference and consistency
checking, and facilitate information extraction. Each of the policy
statements is automatically translated into First-order logic. The
result is logical representation of the policy discussion which we can
query, draw inferences (given ground statements), test for consistency,
and extract detailed information.

Cheers,
Adam Wyner
http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/