[Attempto] Some questions about Attempto

[Norbert E. Fuchs]

On 30 May 2011, at 03:58, Russell Allen wrote:

> I've just started looking into Attempto and had a couple of questions - it would be great if someone could point me towards appropriate papers etc (or tell me that I'm an idiot :)
> 
> I'm wondering how contextualised statements and in particular statements contextualised by time are expressed.
> 
> I'm coming from a law background, so I'm thinking of statements or rules such as:
> 
> James was born on 12 September 1972.
> Books published before 1923 are in the public domain in the United States.
> In this Act, cattle includes any horse, mare, gelding, colt, foal, filly, ass, mule, bull, cow, ox, steer, heifer, calf, ram, ewe, sheep, lamb, pig, goat, deer, alpaca, llama, vicuna, camel, or dromedary, and every hybrid or cross thereof.
> 
> (Last one is really from some Australian legislation. Watch out for the pig/llama crosses, they can be vicious)
> 
> Is this sort of thing possible in Attempt as it is currently defined?
> 

Russell

I appreciate that you consider using Attempto Controlled English (ACE) for your work. 

To see what ACE offers have a look at the documentation (http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/docs/). For a brief introduction read "ACE in a Nutshell" (http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/docs/ace_nutshell.html). You can try your hand at the web-interface of ACE's parser (http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ape/).

In ACE time can only be expressed by prepositional phrases like "in the morning", "after two weeks". There is not much support for dates.

Considering your examples, please note that 

  - ACE knows only the simple present ("was born" is not possible)
  - all nouns must be preceded by a determiner  ("books" -> "all books")
  - relative phrases must start with a pronoun ("book published" -> "all books that are published")
  - lists of conjoined nouns must contain "and" ("horse, mare, gelding" -> "a horse and a mare and a gelding")
  - lists of disjoined nouns must be replaced by disjoined verb phrases ("includes horse, mare, or gelding" -> 
    "includes a horse or includes a mare or includes a gelding")

I suggest that you use these hints to try to ACE'ify your examples via the web-interface of ACE's parser. You are most welcome to come back with further questions.

Best regards.

   --- nef