CE Developing a Controlled English

[David Whitten <whitten@lynx.eaze.net>]

I would like to initiate some discussion on this mailing list.
The stated purpose of this list is:
Purpose:: To discuss and develop a Controlled English as the language of SUO. 

(this is from our home page: http://suo.ieee.org/ )

While I understand that any language can be ambiguous in more than
one way, I'd like us to limit ourselves to the following guidelines:

 1) Discussions must be strongly related to developing SUO-CE.

 2) Any thread, whether on-topic or off-topic may be tabled by 
    request of five or more participants.  
    A separate message requesting tabling a thread is discouraged.
    A tabled thread may be resumed after being quiet for one week.
    Any message about a tabled topic is counted as continuing the thread.

 3) Working code or computable algorithms will be preferred to
    general statements of intent.  Any programming system may be used.
    Commonly available systems will be preferred.

 4) a person may declare themselves a participant in the SUO-CE
    working group explicitly, or implicitly by asking for a thread to
    be tabled.  Simply posting messages to the list does not make
    someone a participant. 
    Participation is by individual, not by organization. 

 5) Anyone may declare themselves to not be a participant in the SUO-CE
    working group explicitly, or implicitly by cross-posting a message
    to both the SUO-CE mailing list and any other SUO mailing list.
    Politeness suggests that they refrain from posting any further messages
    to the mailing list in that case.  All participants are encouraged
    to ignore any postings by non-participants, until they declare
    themselves as participants.

 6) Since the purpose of the working group is to design and implement
    the SUO-CE system, a regular report will be posted back to the
    main SUO group outlining our progress. 
    No more than one report will be sent every two weeks.
    A draft of that report will be sent to the SUO-CE mailing list
    two calendar days before it will be sent to the main list.
    If the thread discussing the draft is tabled, no report will be sent.
    If the thread discussing the draft is active within two hours of
    the time to send to the main list, no report will be sent.

 7) A thread will be started to determine who is willing to act as
    an officer of the mailing list meeting.
    The officers include:

Enumerator : responsible to note when a thread has been tabled.
  Reporter : responsible to send the report of progress
  Rosteror : responsible to answer private emails about participant roster.

Of course, this organization of the mailing list is up for discussion.
I'd hope that we can think of any other ideas and clarify this quickly.

The rest of this e-mail is about the SUO-CE itself.

How to make a SUO-CE:

1) The grammar for SUO-CE should be a context free grammar.
   If we find sample sentences that we want to parse that require
   a context sensitive grammar, we will list them, 
   but not address them in the first phase.
   the first phase should be parseable by some open-source Earley Parser.

2) We will have two kinds of lexical items:
   a) Defined in the Lexicon
   b) Inferred from the input

3) There will be a strict distinction in our discussions
   between a word as an input to the controlled English parser: "word"
   and the structure after parsing which is its meaning:  [word]

4) The mapping in English between a "word" and a [word] appears to
   be many to many.  The Controlled English mapping must be computable,
   and predictable to most .

5) The goal of SUO-CE is to end up with a system that provides a more
   English-like syntax than the traditional Pierce-Peano notation for
   formal logic.  SUO-CE will be a logical notation, however and not
   attempt to handle all of the ambiguities of unrestricted English.


What does this group think ?

David