Abstract
We discuss extensions to the controlled natural language CPL to explicitly define and reason about temporal and spatial concepts. New sentence templates are added to define culturally-specific temporal and spatial names. Two kinds of queries are supported: (1) proximity queries, and (2) relational (e.g., overlap or containment) queries. Proximity queries require concepts grounded in terms of absolute time (UTC times) or location (latitude and longitude). Relational queries can be answered using Allen’s Interval Algebra, for time; or Region Connection Calculus (RCC-8), for regions. Our motivation for handling proximity queries is to allow easy feature definition for a machine learning algorithm that detects anomalous vehicle travel. Our motivation for addressing more general, relational queries is to improve CPL’s modeling of the temporal and spatial relationships of events and objects that occur in sentences, in order to further improve its semantic reasoning capabilities in applications such as Q&A.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Clark, P., Harrison, P., Jenkins, T., Thompson, J., Wojcik, R.: Acquiring and Using World Knowledge using a Restricted Subset of English. In: The 18th International FLAIRS Conference, FLAIRS 2005 (2005)
Ng, A., Russell, S.: Algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning. In: Proceedings of ICML (2000)
Singliar, T., Marginenantu, D.: Scaling up Inverse Reinforcement Learning through Instructed Feature Construction. Snowbird Learning Workshop (2011), http://snowbird.djvuzone.org/2011/abstracts/132.pdf
Kövecses, Z.: Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford University Press, USA (2002)
Kövecses, Z.: Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge University Press (2005)
Kövecses, Z.: Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction. Oxford University Press, USA (2006)
Lakoff, G.: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. University of Chicago Press (1990)
Fuchs, N.E., Schwertel, U., Schwitter, R.: Attempto Controlled English – Not Just Another Logic Specification Language. In: Flener, P. (ed.) LOPSTR 1998. LNCS, vol. 1559, pp. 1–20. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Engelbrecht, P., Hart, G., Dolbear, C.: Talking Rabbit: A User Evaluation of Sentence Production. In: Fuchs, N.E. (ed.) CNL 2009. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5972, pp. 56–64. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Pease, A., Murray, W.R.: An English To Logic Translator For Ontology-Based Knowledge Representation Languages. In: Proceedings of 2003 IEEE International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, NLPKE 2003 (2003)
Clark, P., Murray, W.R., Harrison, P., Thompson, J.: Naturalness vs. Predictability: A Key Debate in Controlled Languages. In: Fuchs, N.E. (ed.) CNL 2009. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5972, pp. 65–81. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Schwitter, R., Tilbrook, M.: PENG: Processable English. Technical report, Macquarie University, Australia (2004)
Schwitter, R.: Controlled Natural Languages for Knowledge Representation. In: COLING 2010, pp. 1113–1121 (2010)
Clark, P., Porter, B.: KM - The Knowledge Machine 2.0: Users Manual, http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mfkb/km.html
Clark, P., Porter, B.: Situations Manual. Note: The Situations Manual is an adjunct manual for the KM Manual. Both can be obtained from, http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mfkb/km.html
Otter. William McCune, http://www.cs.unm.edu/~mccune/otter/
Prover9. William McCune. For Prover9, http://www.cs.unm.edu/~mccune/mace4/ , http://www.cs.unm.edu/~mccune/otter/
WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database (Language, Speech, and Communication) by Christiane Fellbaum (Hardcover - May 15, 1998)
Lakoff, G., Johnson, M.: Metaphors We Live By, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press (1980)
Wikipedia. Coordinated Universal Time, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time (retrieved April 11, 2012)
Wikipedia. Allen’s Interval Algebra, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen%27s_interval_algebra (retrieved April 10, 2012)
Wikipedia. Region Connection Calculus, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region_connection_calculus (retrieved April 10, 2012)
Wikipedia. Professorville, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professorville (retrieved April 11, 2012)
Harrison, P.: A New Algorithm for Parsing Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, Seattle (1988)
Barker, K., Porter, B., Clark, P.: A Library of Generic Concepts for Composing Knowledge Bases. In: Proc. 1st Int. Conf. on Knowledge Capture, K-Cap 2001 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Murray, W.R., Singliar, T. (2012). Spatiotemporal Extensions to a Controlled Natural Language. In: Kuhn, T., Fuchs, N.E. (eds) Controlled Natural Language. CNL 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7427. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32612-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32612-7_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32611-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32612-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)