Stefan Höfler

Attempto controlled english: a knowledge representation language readable by humans and machines

Attempto Controlled English (ACE) is a knowledge representation language with an English syntax. Thus ACE can be used by anyone, even without being familiar with formal notations. The Attempto Parsing Engine translates ACE texts into discourse representation structures, a variant of first-order logic. Hence, ACE turns out to be a logic language equivalent to full first-order logic. The two views of ACE — natural language and logic language — complement each other, and render ACE both human- and machine-readable. This paper covers both views of ACE. In the first part we present the language ACE in a nutshell, and in the second part we give an overview of the discourse representation structures derived from ACE texts.

Legislative Drafting Guidelines: How Different Are They from Controlled Language Rules for Technical Writing?

While human-oriented controlled languages developed and applied in the domain of technical documentation have received considerable attention, language control exerted in the process of legislative drafting has, until recently, gone relatively unnoticed by the controlled language community. This paper considers existing legislative drafting guidelines from the perspective of controlled language. It presents the results of a qualitative comparison of the rule sets of four German-language legislative drafting guidelines from Austria, Germany and Switzerland with a representative collection of controlled language rules published by the German Professional Association for Technical Communication. The analysis determines the extent to which the respective rule sets control the same or similar aspects of language use and identifies the main differences between legislative drafting guidelines and controlled language rules for technical writing.

Controlling ambiguities in legislative language

Legislative language exhibits some characteristics typical of languages of administration that are particularly prone to eliciting ambiguities. However, ambiguity is generally undesirable in legislative texts and can pose problems for the interpretation and application of codified law. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods of controlled natural languages can be applied to prevent ambiguities in legislative texts. We investigate what types of ambiguities are frequent in legislative language and therefore important to control, and we examine which ambiguities are already controlled by existing drafting guidelines. For those not covered by the guidelines, we propose additional control mechanisms. Wherever possible, the devised mechanisms reflect existing conventions and frequency distributions and exploit domain-specific means to make ambiguities explicit.

Verbal Morphosyntactic Disambiguation through Topological Field Recognition in German-Language Law Texts

The morphosyntactic disambiguation of verbs is a crucial pre-processing step for the syntactic analysis of morphologically rich languages like German and domains with complex clause structures like law texts. This paper explores how much linguistically motivated rules can contribute to the task. It introduces an incremental system of verbal morphosyntactic disambiguation that exploits the concept of topological fields. The system presented is capable of reducing the rate of POS-tagging mistakes from 10.2% to 1.6%. The evaluation shows that this reduction is mostly gained through checking the compatibility of morphosyntactic features within the long-distance syntactic relationships of discontinuous verbal elements. Furthermore, the present study shows that in law texts, the average distance between the left and right bracket of clauses is relatively large (9.5 tokens), and that in this domain, a wide context window is therefore necessary for the morphosyntactic disambiguation of verbs.

«Ein Artikel – eine Norm». Redaktionelle Überlegungen zur Diskursstruktur von Gesetzesartikeln

Der Artikel ist die grundlegende Gliederungseinheit in Erlassen. Seine zentrale Rolle ergibt sich insbesondere daraus, dass er die Form ist, in der eine einzelne Norm sprachlich realisiert wird. Dieser Beitrag befasst sich damit, welche redaktionellen Anforderungen an den inneren Aufbau (die Diskursstruktur) von Gesetzesartikeln sich aus dieser Funktion ableiten lassen, und er zeigt auf, wie anhand der Diskursstruktur Artikel identifiziert werden konnen, die mehr als eine Norm enthalten. Der Beitrag verbindet zu diesem Zweck eine rechtstheoretische Betrachtungsweise mit einem textlinguistischen Beschreibungsansatz.

Controlled Legal German 1.0: Einführung und Spezifikation

Dieser technische Bericht beschreibt Controlled Legal German (CLG). CLG ist konzipiert als eine Teilmenge der Schweizerischen Gesetzessprache mit einer eindeutigen formalen Semantik auf der Basis deontischer Logik. CLG soll also beides sein: naturliche Sprache und formal-logische Reprasentationsform. Das in diesem Bericht beschriebene Sprachfragment, CLG 1.0, stellt ein Basisinventar an sprachlichen Konstruktionen zur Verfugung, mit dem einfache Normkonzepte – Gebote, Verbote, Erlaubnisse, Bedingungen, Rechtsfolgen – formuliert werden konnen. Es kann insbesondere als Hilfsmittel verwendet werden, um die grundlegenden Konzepte der deontischen Logik zu erlernen und das Zusammenspiel zwischen deontischer Logik und naturlicher Sprache zu studieren.