Attempto Controlled English (ACE)

Attempto Controlled English (ACE) allows domain specialists to interactively formulate requirements specifications in domain concepts. ACE can be accurately and efficiently processed by a computer, but is expressive enough to allow natural usage. The Attempto system translates specification texts in ACE into discourse representation structures and optionally into Prolog. Translated specification texts are incrementally added to a knowledge base. This knowledge base can be queried in ACE for verification, and it can be executed for simulation, prototyping and validation of the specification.Comment: 13 pages, compressed, uuencoded Postscript, to be presented at CLAW 96, The First International Workshop on Controlled Language Applications, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 26-27 March 199

Attempto - From Specifications in Controlled Natural Language towards Executable Specifications

Deriving formal specifications from informal requirements is difficult since one has to take into account the disparate conceptual worlds of the application domain and of software development. To bridge the conceptual gap we propose controlled natural language as a textual view on formal specifications in logic. The specification language Attempto Controlled English (ACE) is a subset of natural language that can be accurately and efficiently processed by a computer, but is expressive enough to allow natural usage. The Attempto system translates specifications in ACE into discourse representation structures and into Prolog. The resulting knowledge base can be queried in ACE for verification, and it can be executed for simulation, prototyping and validation of the specification.Comment: 15 pages, compressed, uuencoded Postscript, to be presented at EMISA Workshop 'Naturlichsprachlicher Entwurf von Informationssystemen - Grundlagen, Methoden, Werkzeuge, Anwendungen', May 28-30, 1996, Ev. Akademie Tutzin

Writing clinical practice guidelines in controlled natural language

Clinicians could benefit from decision support systems incorporating the knowledge contained in clinical practice guidelines. However, the unstructured form of these guidelines makes them unsuitable for formal representation. To address this challenge we translated a complete set of pediatric guideline recommendations into Attempto Controlled English (ACE). One experienced pediatrician, one physician and a knowledge engineer assessed that a suitably extended version of ACE can accurately and naturally represent the clinical concepts and the proposed actions of the guidelines. Currently, we are developing a systematic and replicable approach to authoring guideline recommendations in ACE

Achieving High Quality Knowledge Acquisition using Controlled Natural Language

Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs) are efficient languages for knowledge acquisition and reasoning. They are designed as a subset of natural languages with restricted grammar while being highly expressive. CNLs are designed to be automatically translated into logical representations, which can be fed into rule engines for query and reasoning. In this work, we build a knowledge acquisition machine, called KAM, that extends Attempto Controlled English (ACE) and achieves three goals. First, KAM can identify CNL sentences that correspond to the same logical representation but expressed in various syntactical forms. Second, KAM provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows users to disambiguate the knowledge acquired from text and incorporates user feedback to improve knowledge acquisition quality. Third, KAM uses a paraconsistent logical framework to encode CNL sentences in order to achieve reasoning in the presence of inconsistent knowledge

How Controlled English can Improve Semantic Wikis

The motivation of semantic wikis is to make acquisition, maintenance, and mining of formal knowledge simpler, faster, and more flexible. However, most existing semantic wikis have a very technical interface and are restricted to a relatively low level of expressivity. In this paper, we explain how AceWiki uses controlled English - concretely Attempto Controlled English (ACE) - to provide a natural and intuitive interface while supporting a high degree of expressivity. We introduce recent improvements of the AceWiki system and user studies that indicate that AceWiki is usable and useful

AceWiki: Collaborative Ontology Management in Controlled Natural Language

AceWiki is a prototype that shows how a semantic wiki using controlled natural language - Attempto Controlled English (ACE) in our case - can make ontology management easy for everybody. Sentences in ACE can automatically be translated into first-order logic, OWL, or SWRL. AceWiki integrates the OWL reasoner Pellet and ensures that the ontology is always consistent. Previous results have shown that people with no background in logic are able to add formal knowledge to AceWiki without being instructed or trained in advance

Declarative Specification

Deriving formal specifications from informal requirements is extremely difficult since one has to overcome the conceptual gap between an application domain and the domain of formal specification methods. To reduce this gap we introduce application-specific specification languages, i.e., graphical and textual notations that can be unambiguously mapped to formal specifications in a logic language. We describe a number of realised approaches based on this idea, and evaluate them with respect to their domain specificity vs. generalit