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International Workshop on Logic, Language, Information, and Computation

WoLLIC 2011: Logic, Language, Information and Computation pp 257–271Cite as

Querying the Fragments of English

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6642))

Abstract

Controlled languages are fragments of natural languages stripped clean of lexical, structural and semantic ambiguity. They have been proposed as a means for providing natural language front-ends to access structured knowledge sources, given that they compositionally and deterministically translate into the (logic-based) formalisms such back-end systems support. An important issue that arises in this context is the semantic data complexity of accessing such information (i.e., the computational complexity of querying measured w.r.t. the number of instances declared in the back-end knowledge base or database). In this paper we study the semantic data complexity of a distinguished family of context-free controlled fragments, viz., Pratt and Third’s fragments of English. In doing so, we pinpoint those fragments for which the reasoning problems are tractable (in PTime) or intractable (NP-hard or coNP-hard).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, 3 Piazza Domenicani, 39100, Bolzano, Italy

    Camilo Thorne

Authors
  1. Camilo Thorne
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Steklov Mathematical Institute, Gubkina 8, 117966, Moscow, Russia

    Lev D. Beklemishev

  2. Centro de Informática, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Avenida Prof Luis Freire s/n, Cidade Universitária, 50740-540, Recife, PE, Brazil

    Ruy de Queiroz

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Thorne, C. (2011). Querying the Fragments of English. In: Beklemishev, L.D., de Queiroz, R. (eds) Logic, Language, Information and Computation. WoLLIC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6642. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20920-8_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20920-8_25

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20919-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20920-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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