[Attempto] my reasons for subscribing to the list

[Norbert E. Fuchs]

On 11 Feb 2012, at 17:34 , Patrick Forkin wrote:

> ... As I writer researching and writing in both English and German I have built a framework to support 
> my work in two languages and even allow me to translate texts I write in English into German. 
> 
> It works well, but I wish to automate certain of its time-consuming tasks.
> 
> ...
> 
> For a variety of reasons I ...will look for an ability to use a 
> language that uses natural language or controlled English, to create a form of pseudocode which can be 
> translated into a language such as Prolog.
> 
> Is the language Attempto far enough down the development path to be used in such a context?
> 
> Are there working projects doing such from which I might gather experiences of others?

Patrick

If I understood your message correctly, you are addressing two topics: 

(1) translation between English and German
(2) translation of (controlled) English into Prolog

Concerning (1), I'd like to point you to the Grammatical Framework GF (http://www.grammaticalframework.org/).

Concerning (2), Attempto Controlled English ACE (http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/) can be translated into Discourse Representation Structures DRS, i.e. first-order logic (see http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/ape/). A subset of ACE can be translated into DRSs that can be further translated into Prolog clauses. Recall that Prolog does not allow for clauses with disjunctive heads. Thus ACE sentences of the form "Every A is a B or is a C." cannot be translated into Prolog clauses. There are further syntactic restrictions when you use negation.

We just started in the EU project MOLTO (http://www.molto-project.eu/) to translate ACE from English into other controlled languages, but results are not to be expected any time soon. 

Regards.

   --- nef