Attempto Controlled English Research Articles

Formal modelling of OWL ontologies-based requirements for the development of safe and secure smart city systems

Formal methods are mathematical techniques used for developing reliable and verified systems. Event-B formal method is proved to be very useful to construct models of systems that are corrected by construction. Developing safe, secure, and reliable smart systems is essential for effective smart city solutions. The integration of safety and security mechanisms is an important aspect to achieve trust in smart cities’ services and applications. In this paper, we present prototype for the development of smart systems using OWL ontologies and Event-B formal models. We focus on the proposed approach that uses OWL ontologies to generate Event-B formal models for secure and safe development of systems. In recent years, ontologies-driven approaches have been applied during different phases to requirements engineering (RE), such as elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation. Many empirical studies have demonstrated benefits of the application of ontologies to handle ambiguity, inconsistency and incompleteness of requirements. We derive benefit from OWL ontologies to produce textual requirements that are consistent, complete, and unambiguous for formal modelling and to manage traceability between requirements and models. The approach uses Protege-OWL editor, OWL verbaliser, Rodin platform, and OntoGraf tool. Protege-OWL editor enables to build and view ontologies in Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL verbaliser is used to generate controlled English requirements called Attempto Controlled English (ACE) from OWL ontologies. ACE representation is used as input requirements and transformed into Event-B formal models. Rodin platform is used for specification, refinement and proof. OntoGraf is a tool in Protege that is used to visualise ontologies, and we make use of OntoGraf in this paper to assist in deciding refinement strategy and managing traceability between requirements and models.

The Representation of Facts about Old Russian Charters on the Semantic Web: Attempto Controlled English (ACE)

This paper discusses some promising approaches to the representation of meta-information (facts) about medieval Russian charters on the Semantic Web in order to provide researchers with appropriate tools for the capture, aggregation, and semantic linkage of facts related to the charters and automatic logical inference. The authors demonstrate the actual and potential possibilities of a controlled natural language, ACE (Attempto Controlled English), in the representation of the meta-information about Old Russian charters. Recent research conducted by the authors confirms that the prospects for using ACE as a tool for representation of the facts about the charters on the Semantic Web are closely connected with the possibilities to make logic inferences based on ACE texts. Therefore, special attention is devoted to ACE tools, especially to Ace Rules and ACE Reasoner (RACE).

The application of controlled natural language on carbon market domain knowledge for enhanced retrieval of information

Natural language processing has been used in modelling knowledge about different domains for use in different applications, particularly to those with minimal computer science skills. Although natural language is easy to learn, it is often riddled with ambiguities, vagueness and a very high potential for inconsistencies. Thus, controlled natural language, a subset of natural language has emerged and promises to improve on some major natural language deficiencies. Given the multiplicity of controlled natural languages, Attempto Controlled English (ACE), one of the leading controlled natural languages, was chosen and explored to represent knowledge about the domain of carbon market. The outcome of this study is a prototypical controlled natural language carbon market ontology that can be used in making informed decisions about investment in carbon marketing. In order to establish the suitability and purpose for which the prototype was developed, it was evaluated using appropriate techniques and ontology reasoners.

Service-oriented Architecture of Intelligent Environment for Historical Records Studies

Nowadays, such socio-technical systems as virtual research environments are increasingly employed in the studies of textual heritage. The paper presents a modular platform based on a combination of Web services that provide tools for historical records publishing and research. A promising approach is the creation of semantic networks that encompass marked up texts of records (in this case, medieval documents preserved at Latvian State Historical Archives) and corresponding meta-information. The authors describe the prototype of a software system, which maps XML markup into ACE (Attempto Controlled English) statements; these statements can be automatically translated into OWL (Ontological Web Language), visualized as semantic networks, or queried by means of Web services of Attempto Project. This system is designed as an intelligent environment for collaborative research.

Paraconsistency and word puzzles

AbstractWord puzzles and the problem of their representations in logic languages have received considerable attention in the last decade (Ponnuruet al. 2004; Shapiro 2011; Baral and Dzifcak 2012; Schwitter 2013). Of special interest is the problem of generating such representations directly from natural language (NL) or controlled natural language (CNL). An interesting variation of this problem, and to the best of our knowledge, scarcely explored variation in this context, is when the input information is inconsistent. In such situations, the existing encodings of word puzzles produce inconsistent representations and break down. In this paper, we bring the well-known type of paraconsistent logics, calledAnnotated Predicate Calculus(APC) (Kifer and Lozinskii 1992), to bear on the problem. We introduce a new kind of non-monotonic semantics for APC, calledconsistency preferred stable modelsand argue that it makes APC into a suitable platform for dealing with inconsistency in word puzzles and, more generally, in NL sentences. We also devise a number of general principles to help the user choose among the different representations of NL sentences, which might seem equivalent but, in fact, behave differently when inconsistent information is taken into account. These principles can be incorporated into existing CNL translators, such as Attempto Controlled English (ACE) (Fuchset al. 2008) and PENG Light (White and Schwitter 2009). Finally, we show that APC with the consistency preferred stable model semantics can be equivalently embedded in ASP with preferences over stable models, and we use this embedding to implement this version of APC in Clingo (Gebseret al. 2011) and its Asprin add-on (Brewkaet al. 2015).

Derivation of Event-B Models from OWL Ontologies

The derivation of formal specifications from large and complex requirements is a key challenge in systems engineering. In this paper we present an approach that aims to address this challenge by building formal models from OWL ontologies. An ontology is used in the field of knowledge representation to capture a clear view of the domain and to produce a concise and unambiguous set of domain requirements. We harness the power of ontologies to handle inconsistency of domain requirements and produce clear, concise and unambiguous set of domain requirements for Event-B modelling. The proposed approach works by generating Attempto Controlled English (ACE) from the OWL ontology and then maps the ACE requirements to develop Event-B models. ACE is a subset of English that can be unambiguously translated into first-order logic. There is an injective mapping between OWL ontology and a subset of ACE. ACE is a suitable interlingua for producing the mapping between OWL and Event-B models for many reasons. Firstly, ACE is easy to learn and understand, it hides the math of OWL and would be natural to use by everybody. Secondly ACE has a parser that converts ACE texts into Discourse Representation Structures (DRS). Finally, ACE can be extended to target a richer syntactic subset of Event-B which ultimately would facilitate the translation of ACE requirements to Event-B.

Collaborative multilingual knowledge management based on controlled natural language

User interfaces are a critical aspect of semantic knowledge representation systems, as users have to understand and use a formal representation language to model a particular domain of interest, which is known to be a difficult task. Things are even more challenging in a multilingual setting, where users speaking different languages have to create a multilingual ontology. To address these problems, we introduce a semantic wiki system that is based on controlled natural language to provide an intuitive yet formal interface. We use a well-defined subset of Attempto Controlled English (ACE) implemented in Grammatical Framework. Our wiki system offers precise bidirectional automatic translations between ACE and language fragments of a number of other natural languages, making the wiki content accessible multilingually. Because ACE has a partial but deterministic mapping to the Web Ontology Language, our wiki engine can offer automatic reasoning and question answering over the wiki content. Users speaking different languages can therefore build, query, and view the same knowledge base in an intuitive and user-friendly interface based on the respective natural language. We present the results of a user evaluation where participants using different languages were asked to write and assess statements about European geography in our wiki environment. Our results show that users reach a high level of consensus, which is not negatively affected by the presence of automatic translation.

A Principled Approach to Grammars for Controlled Natural Languages and Predictive Editors

Controlled natural languages (CNL) with a direct mapping to formal logic have been proposed to improve the usability of knowledge representation systems, query interfaces, and formal specifications. Predictive editors are a popular approach to solve the problem that CNLs are easy to read but hard to write. Such predictive editors need to be able to "look ahead" in order to show all possible continuations of a given unfinished sentence. Such lookahead features, however, are difficult to implement in a satisfying way with existing grammar frameworks, especially if the CNL supports complex nonlocal structures such as anaphoric references. Here, methods and algorithms are presented for a new grammar notation called Codeco, which is specifically designed for controlled natural languages and predictive editors. A parsing approach for Codeco based on an extended chart parsing algorithm is presented. A large subset of Attempto Controlled English (ACE) has been represented in Codeco. Evaluation of this grammar and the parser implementation shows that the approach is practical, adequate and efficient.

Writing clinical practice guidelines in controlled natural language

Clinicians could benefit from decision support systems incorporating the knowledge contained in clinical practice guidelines. However, the unstructured form of these guidelines makes them unsuitable for formal representation. To address this challenge we translated a complete set of pediatric guideline recommendations into Attempto Controlled English (ACE). One experienced pediatrician, one physician and a knowledge engineer assessed that a suitably extended version of ACE can accurately and naturally represent the clinical concepts and the proposed actions of the guidelines. Currently, we are developing a systematic and replicable approach to authoring guideline recommendations in ACE.