Attempto Controlled English: A Knowledge Representation Language Readable by Humans and Machines

Attempto Controlled English (ACE) is a knowledge representation language with an English syntax. Thus ACE can be used by anyone, even without being familiar with formal notations. The Attempto Parsing Engine translates ACE texts into discourse representation structures, a variant of first-order logic. Hence, ACE turns out to be a logic language equivalent to full first-order logic. The two views of ACE — natural language and logic language — complement each other, and render ACE both human- and machine-readable. This paper covers both views of ACE. In the first part we present the language ACE in a nutshell, and in the second part we give an overview of the discourse representation structures derived from ACE texts.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Informatics & Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Switzerland

   Norbert E. Fuchs, Stefan Höfler, Kaarel Kaljurand, Fabio Rinaldi & Gerold Schneider

Editors and Affiliations

1. Institute for Informatics, University of Munich, Oettingenstraße 67, D-80538, München, Germany

   Norbert Eisinger

2. Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, 581 83, Linköping, Sweden

   Jan Małuszyński

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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