[Attempto] Temporal coordination/rewriting to fit ACE

[Halley Young]

Hello,

I have been experimenting with using attempto controlled english as an
interface for a music generation tool (for which specifications are written
in Datalog).  The APE interface for attempto statements to Prolog has been
incredibly helpful, and it's been surprisingly easy to write simple
statements in ACE and then have them included in the datalog specification.

However - one thing I'm not really sure how to do with ACE that's crucial
for musical specifications is temporal coordination.  For instance, the
following sentences parse in APE:

"The theme for the flute should be lyrical."

"The motion in the clarinet and the motion in the violin should be
parallel."


However, I'm interested in particular for this domain in temporal
subordination - for instance:


"[Until/While/Whenever] the movement in the clarinet and the movement in
the violin is parallel, the theme for the flute should be lyrical."


This seems like a pretty basic requirement for my use case.  How would you
approach it using ACE?


My first thought was that whenever I parse a sentence using a constituency
parser and it divides into a "While X, Y" statement, I would rewrite it
before sending it to the parser as "There is some time that X.  If X then
Y."  Is there a better way to think about this?  And if rewriting like this
is the right way to go about it, are there existing tools for performing
such rewriting in an elegant way?



Many thanks,
-- 
Halley Young
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~halleyy/
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