Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are subsets of
natural language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. 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 in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement ...
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'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 ( abbreviated ) 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 parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...
s", "Only use dictionary-approved words", and "Use only the
active voice
Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages. A ...
".
The second type of languages have a formal syntax and semantics, and can be mapped to an existing
formal language
In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules.
The alphabet of a formal language consists of sym ...
, such as
first-order logic
First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
. Thus, those languages can be used as
knowledge representation languages, and writing of those languages is supported by fully automatic
consistency
In classical deductive logic, a consistent theory is one that does not lead to a logical contradiction. The lack of contradiction can be defined in either semantic or syntactic terms. The semantic definition states that a theory is consistent ...
and redundancy checks,
query answering, etc.
Languages
Existing controlled natural languages include:
*
ASD Simplified Technical English
*
Attempto Controlled English
Attempto Controlled English (ACE) is a controlled natural language, i.e. a subset of standard English with a restricted syntax and restricted semantics described by a small set of construction and interpretation rules. It has been under developmen ...
*
Aviation English
Aviation English is the '' de facto'' international language of civil aviation. With the expansion of air travel in the 20th century, there were safety concerns about the ability of pilots and air traffic controllers to communicate. In 1951, the ...
*
Basic English
Basic English (British American Scientific International and Commercial English) is an English-based controlled language created by the linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teach ...
*
ClearTalk
*
Common Logic Controlled English
*
Distributed Language Translation Esperanto
*
E-Prime
*
Français fondamental
''Français fondamental'' (French for ''Fundamental French'') is a list of words and grammatical concepts, devised in the beginning of the 1950s for teaching foreigners and residents of the French Union, France's colonial empire. A series of inves ...
*
Gellish Formal English
* Interlingua-IL sive
Latino sine flexione
Latino sine flexione ("Latin without inflections"), Interlingua de Academia pro Interlingua (IL de ApI) or Peano's Interlingua (abbreviated as IL), is an international auxiliary language compiled by the Academia pro Interlingua under chairmanshi ...
(
Giuseppe Peano)
* ModeLang
*
Newspeak
Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of the 1949 dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', by George Orwell. In the novel, the Party created Newspeak to meet the ideological requirements ...
* Processable English (PENG)
*
Seaspeak
*
Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a bus ...
*
Special English
Encoding
IETF
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements an ...
has reserved as a
BCP 47
An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the su ...
variant subtag for simplified versions of languages.
See also
*
Constructed language
A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. ...
*
Knowledge representation and reasoning
Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...
*
Natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
*
Controlled vocabulary
Control may refer to:
Basic meanings Economics and business
* Control (management), an element of management
* Control, an element of management accounting
* Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization
* Control ...
*
Controlled language in machine translation
*
Structured English Structured English is the use of the English language with the syntax of structured programming to communicate the design of a computer program to non-technical users by breaking it down into logical steps using straightforward English words. Struc ...
*
Word-sense disambiguation
Word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to consc ...
*
Simple English Wikipedia
References
External links
Controlled Natural Languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Controlled Natural Language
Natural language processing