[Attempto] Broader the range of texts that can be mapped to ACE

[Norbert E. Fuchs]

On 27 Jan 2013, at 23:53 , Simon Spero <sesuncedu at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Norbert E. Fuchs <fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch> wrote:
>  
> In my view, natural English and controlled English are conceptually different languages that need a human translator.

This sentence – seen in isolation – could be misunderstood. Perhaps I should have been more careful when I wrote it.

In the context of Jean-Marc's message

> ... Would that make sense to train a text machine learning algorithm witt texts in natural english and their translation in ACE? ...

and the rest of my message the sentence was meant as 

In my view, natural English and controlled English are conceptually different languages and you need a human translator for the translation from natural English to controlled English.

> ... I would claim that any controlled version C of a natural language L must be a subset of L,  such that every sentence in C is a sentence of L;  

I would write "grammatical subset" since the semantics may differ. The sentence "A man sees a girl with a red skirt." does have different meanings in English and in ACE.

However, to make the grammatical rules of a controlled language consistent, you may end up violating the pragmatics of the respective natural language. An example is ACE's rule "Phrasal particles and those prepositions that introduce a complement of a transitive verb, must be hyphenated to the verb." Thus both "John turns-off the light." and "There is a light. John turns-off it." are accepted by the ACE parser. The first example obeys English pragmatics, the second not.

> that every sentence in C has a single parse,

Though ACE texts have a single parse, there are other controlled subsets of English that allow more than one parse.

> and that this parse must be a possible parsing of the sentence in L.  

Sure.

> ... A designer of a controlled version of a natural language is constrained by the grammar of the natural language; they  are not free to introduce new grammatical constructs, etc., 

This depends on the application you want to use the controlled language for. In one instance we considered extending ACE by URLs and name-spaces which people might disagree as belonging to the grammar of English. 

> should recognize/generate as natural a set of sentences as possible, but must avoid ambiguity.  

Again, there are controlled languages that allow for ambiguity.

> ... texts in ACE are understandable by speakers of English; 

Grammatically yes, semantically not necessarily as the above "red skirt" example shows.

> however, these speakers need some training or guidance to produce correct ACE.  

We replaced the grammatical training by guidance in the predictive ACE editor and in AceWiki, though some training of the semantics is still needed.

Regards.

   --- nef