ACE¹ compliant controlled Latvian² for ontology³ authoring and verbalization

¹ Attempto Controlled English
² A highly synthetic language with rich morphology; member of the Baltic language group that is a close sibling to the Slavic language group
³ OWL axioms + SWRL rules + SPARQL integrity queries

On-line demo

Express axioms and rules of sample domain ontologies (University and Wildlife) in controlled Latvian and English (in parallel):

• Demonstrator
• Fridge magnets
• Translator

The latter two demonstrations exploit the interactive web applications described in B. Bringert, K. Angelov, and A. Ranta: Grammatical Framework Web Service.

Sample sentences (University-0.1):

1. Terminological statements
• Classes
• every professor is a teacher .
• no assistant is a professor .
• every course is something that is a mandatory course or that is an optional course .
• every teacher teaches a course .
• every course is taught by a teacher .
• every student is a person that is enrolled by an academic program .
• everything that teaches a mandatory course is a professor .
• everything that is included by an academic program is taught by a teacher .
• Properties
• everything that teaches something is a teacher .
• everything that is taught by something is a course .
• if X includes something that is taken by Y then X enrolls Y .
• if X teaches Y then X does not take Y .
• if X includes Y then X is constituted by Y .
2. Rules
• every mandatory course that is included by an academic program is taken by every student that is enrolled by the academic program .
• every person that takes a mandatory course that is included by an academic program that enrolls the person is a student .
3. Queries
• is there a student that takes a course that is not included by an academic program that enrolls the student ?

Note: Animate and inanimate things are not distinguished. Direct translation (in GF) to/from the Functional-Style Syntax of OWL is supported only in version 0.1 and only for class axioms (i.e., for statements that do not use anaphoric references, incl. variables).

Source code

• Version 0.6.1
• Version 0.6
• Version 0.1

Evaluation

Results of the first public survey are summarized here.

Related publications

• Normunds Grūzītis. Formal Grammar and Semantics of Controlled Latvian Language. Doctoral thesis (summary). University of Latvia, 2011
• Normunds Grūzītis and Guntis Bārzdiņš. Towards a More Natural Multilingual Controlled Language Interface to OWL. In: 9th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS), Oxford, UK, 2011, pp. 335-339
• Normunds Grūzītis, Gunta Nešpore and Baiba Saulīte. Verbalizing Ontologies in Controlled Baltic Languages. In: 4th International Conference on Human Language Technologies - "The Baltic Perspective", Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 219, IOS Press, 2010, pp. 187-194
• Normunds Grūzītis. Word Order Based Analysis of Given and New Information in Controlled Synthetic Languages. In: 1st Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web, WWW2010, Raleigh (NC), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 571, 2010, pp. 29-34
• Normunds Grūzītis and Guntis Bārzdiņš. Polysemy in Controlled Natural Language Texts. In: Fuchs N.E. (Ed.), Controlled Natural Language (CNL 2009), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 5972, Springer, 2010, pp. 102-120
• Baiba Saulīte. Linguistic Markers of Information Structure in Latvian. In: 18th International Congress of Linguists, Seoul, Korea, The Linguistic Society of Korea, 2008, pp. 3067-3076