Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are subsets of
natural language
A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...
s that are obtained by restricting the grammar and vocabulary in order to reduce or eliminate
ambiguity
Ambiguity is the type of meaning (linguistics), meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several interpretations; others describe it as a concept or statement that has no real reference. A com ...
and complexity. Traditionally, controlled languages fall into two major types: those that improve readability for human readers (e.g. non-native speakers),
and those that enable reliable automatic
semantic analysis of the language.
The first type of languages (often called "simplified" or "technical" languages), for example
ASD Simplified Technical English, Caterpillar Technical English,
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
's Easy English, are used in the industry to increase the quality of technical documentation, and possibly simplify the
semi-automatic translation of the documentation. These languages restrict the writer by general rules such as "Keep sentences short", "Avoid the use of
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but so ...
s", "Only use dictionary-approved words", and "Use only the
active voice".
The second type of languages have a formal syntax and
formal semantics, and can be mapped to an existing
formal language
In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "alphabet".
The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols that concatenate into strings (also c ...
, such as
first-order logic. Thus, those languages can be used as
knowledge representation languages, and writing of those languages is supported by fully automatic
consistency
In deductive logic, a consistent theory is one that does not lead to a logical contradiction. A theory T is consistent if there is no formula \varphi such that both \varphi and its negation \lnot\varphi are elements of the set of consequences ...
and redundancy checks,
query answering, etc.
Languages
Existing controlled natural languages include:
*
ASD Simplified Technical English
*
Attempto Controlled English
*
Aviation English
*
Basic English
*
ClearTalk
*
Common Logic Controlled English
*
Distributed Language Translation Esperanto
*
Easy Japanese
*
E-Prime
*
Français fondamental
*
Gellish Formal English
* Interlingua-IL sive
Latino sine flexione (
Giuseppe Peano
Giuseppe Peano (; ; 27 August 1858 – 20 April 1932) was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much Mathematical notati ...
)
* Logical English
* ModeLang
*
Newspeak (fictional)
* Processable English (PENG)
*
Seaspeak
*
Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
*
Special English
Encoding
IETF
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...
has reserved as a
BCP 47 variant subtag for simplified versions of languages.
See also
*
Constructed language
*
Knowledge representation and reasoning
Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...
*
Natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
*
Controlled vocabulary
A controlled vocabulary provides a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. Controlled vocabularies are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems. Controlled v ...
*
Controlled language in machine translation
*
Structured English
*
Word-sense disambiguation
*
Simple English Wikipedia
References
External links
Controlled Natural Languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Controlled Natural Language
Natural language processing