Constructing Controlled English for both human usage and machine processing

Abstract

We present our on-going research on constructing and extending a version of Controlled English (CE) in support of knowledge sharing and decision-making for effective and efficient operations in the military coalition environment. This work would be useful for any multinational English speaking environment. This CE is intended for both human use and machine processing, providing: (i) A user-friendly language in a form of English enabling the user to use it in a fairly intuitive way. (ii) A precise language that enables clear, unambiguous representation of information that is amenable to rule-based interpretation and inferencing. The paper focuses on the discussion of methods for CE construction while optimizing a balance between the naturalness for humans and machine readability of the CE language in light of theoretical considerations and empirical experimentations. We discuss certain aspects of CE syntax, semantics and the lexical model as examples. We also show sample CE-based knowledge-sharing capabilities.