[Attempto] executable specifications

[Kenneth Jones]

Simon,

I'm sorry, but can you tell me what the word "underglotted" means?  I
googled "underglotted" and "glotted" and couldn't find a definition of
either word.  My guess is that you mean by "underglotted" the opposite of
"polyglotted" (from the Greek word for tongue/language).  Is that correct?
If so, this is a very clever neologism.  Nice.

Alas, I will admit that I am one of those lame Americans who is a monoglot.
But I did come close to learning German once.  Like Norbert, my Ph.D. is in
Physics and when I started graduate school there was a foreign language
requirement.  The language I chose to learn was German.  Unfortunately (in
retrospect), the foreign language requirement was dropped while I was
earning my Ph.D. and I took the easy way out and didn't learn another
language.  I now regret that decision, but finding the time to learn another
language at this point in my life would be very difficult.

I certainly don't expect *any* publication to be written in English, but I
would love to find a translator that works well enough that I can actually
understand its English output.  There are a lot of excellent publications
written in German that I wish I could read.  Thus, my question about
translation software.

I agree that the need to install Prolog and get its libraries to play nicely
with your Java app can be a deterrent to widespread adoption of the Attempto
tools.  I think that Tobias Kuhn has taken a large step forward in this area
by encapsulating AceWiki in a virtual machine.  Another very nice approach
would be, as you suggest, to port the code so that it can run in an embedded
Prolog engine like tuProlog <http://alice.unibo.it/xwiki/bin/view/Tuprolog/>.
I have also played around with translating the ACE parser Prolog code to
Java using Prolog Cafe.  It actually did a much better job than I thought it
would.  It looked like it might not require a great deal of work to enhance
Prolog Cafe and tweak the ACE code to get this translation working.

-- Ken

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Simon Spero <ses at unc.edu> wrote:

> I would just like to add how unfair it is to a poor, underglotted
> Englishman for a thesis, on the subject of Controlled English, available
> from the authors website at an Australian university, turn out to be written
> in German. :-)
>
> I thought that some of the partners in REWERSE were industry, and that some
> changes were made to ACE in response to issues found in application? I don't
> have my .bib to hand (I wonder if there is a bibtex app for Android )?
>
> I expect that once the native java parsers are marked stable
> (release_number >= 1.0) ACE will start picking up new user communities. If
> the owl mapping code can run reasonably well on one of the java prolog
> engines that would make a nice combo.
>
> Simon
>
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