RE: CE Starter grammar

[John.Velman@HSC.com]

All,

Well, both Matthew and Graham are right.  We need to focus on
something that looks like English hence the need to explicitly
establish a syntactic structure consistent with traditional
structures.  Our goal is a language stands unambiguously in an
isomorphic relation to KIF.

Perhaps one approach is to take a minimal syntactic
structure such as Adam proposes, agree on some core terms
and syntax (in CE) for "exists" "forall" "and" "or"...
and then play with it a little.  My experience suggests that
it is really useful to play with some simple -- even toy --
examples before getting too deep into a design.  (If I have
some time later on today -- and noone else has done it --
I'll give this a try.)

Also, while I agree that it will ultimately be useful to
expand into questions and commands as Graham suggests,
I propose that for now we concentrate on assertive statements.


--  By the way, :-)  I endorse David's rules for this
list, and hereby declare myself a participant.

Best,

John Velman




"Horn, Graham" <graham.horn@aihw.gov.au>@majordomo.ieee.org on 06/01/2001
01:32:24 AM

Sent by:  owner-suo-ce@majordomo.ieee.org


To:    "'West, Matthew MR SSI-GREA-UK'" <Matthew.R.West@IS.shell.com>,
       "'Adam Pease'" <apease@ks.teknowledge.com>, suo-ce@ieee.org
cc:

Subject:  RE: CE Starter grammar



Hi Matthew,
     .         I don't know whether you're right or not.

     .    I presume you got my earlier e-mail augmenting the structure
Adam initiated.

     .    I believe it would pay to use the power of the traditional
Gręco­Roman­based grammar rules that have had literally thousands of years
of evolution.

     .    Once one has a sound structure, by all means restrict it
down to a smaller sub-set. But if one doesn't get the structure right to
start with, one will end up with something others will be able to use as
evidence that "something like ACE can't possibly work". I'm sure you recall
the many e-mails along that line I copped earlier on.

     .    I remain absolutely adamant that for a modified restricted
version of a natural language one MUST have a totally consistent
grammatical
and semantic structure. That's why I feel there is value in taking Adam's
line at this initial stage.



Cheers                   Graham Horn
National Data Standards Unit
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
================================================
Phone:         +61.2.6244.1094
Fax:           +61.2.6244.1199
E­mail:        Graham.Horn@aihw.gov.au <mailto:graham.horn@aihw.gov.au>


-----Original Message-----
From:     West, Matthew MR SSI-GREA-UK [mailto:Matthew.R.West@IS.shell.com]
Sent:     Friday, June 01, 2001 6:12 PM
To:  'Adam Pease'; suo-ce@ieee.org
Subject:  RE: CE Starter grammar


Dear Adam,

I think you are starting at the wrong end of the problem. We only
want to say those things that can be said in KIF, but we want them
to be easily understood by a consistent translation to/from English.
So it would be better ot start from teh KIF end (much more
restricted) and identify English forms for what can be said. This
would probably give a more restricted grammar than you have
proposed.

Regards
      Matthew
===============================================================
Matthew West                    http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/

Principal Consultant                   Shell Visiting Professor
Operations & Asset Management            The Keyworth Institute
Shell Services International            The University of Leeds
http://www.shellservices.com/  http://www.keyworth.leeds.ac.uk/

H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
===============================================================

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam Pease [mailto:apease@ks.teknowledge.com]
> Sent: 01 June 2001 03:15
> To: suo-ce@ieee.org
> Subject: CE Starter grammar
>
>
>
> Folks,
>    I'll suggest the following strawman as a start on a
> restricted English
> grammar.
>
>                        sentence
>                      /         \
>                    SNP|Q         VP
>                   /    \      /     \
>                 Det   N|PN    V   NP|SNP
>                                   / | \
>                                 Det M N|PN
>
> where:
>    SNP = simple noun phrase
>    NP = noun phrase
>    Det = determiner [the|a|an|all|every]
>    N = noun
>    V = verb
>    VP = verb phrase
>    PN = proper noun
>    M = modifier
>    Q = query word [who|what|where]
>
>
> Adam
>