Controlled natural language
Template:Short description Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are subsets of natural languages that are obtained by restricting the grammar and vocabulary in order to reduce or eliminate ambiguity 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
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 pronouns", "Only use dictionary-approved words", and "Use only the active voice".<ref>Template:Cite conference</ref>
The second type of languages have a formal syntax and formal semantics, and can be mapped to an existing formal language, such as first-order logic. Thus, those languages can be used as knowledge representation languages,<ref>Schwitter, Rolf. "Controlled natural languages for knowledge representation." Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010.</ref> and writing of those languages is supported by fully automatic consistency and redundancy checks, query answering, etc.
LanguagesEdit
Existing controlled natural languages include:<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name="Pool2006">Template:Cite journal</ref>
- ASD Simplified Technical English
- Attempto Controlled English<ref>Template:Cite conference</ref>
- Aviation English
- Basic English<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
- ClearTalk
- Common Logic Controlled English<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation
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- Distributed Language Translation Esperanto
- Easy Japanese
- E-Prime
- Français fondamental
- Gellish Formal English
- Interlingua-IL sive Latino sine flexione (Giuseppe Peano)
- Logical English<ref>Kowalski, R., Dávila, J., Sartor, G. and Calejo, M., 2023. Logical English for law and education. In Prolog: The Next 50 Years (pp. 287-299). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.</ref>
- ModeLang<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
- Newspeak (fictional)
- Processable English (PENG)<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
- Seaspeak
- Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
- Special English
EncodingEdit
IETF has reserved <syntaxhighlight lang="text" class="" style="" inline="1">simple</syntaxhighlight> as a BCP 47 variant subtag for simplified versions of languages.<ref name="Everson">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
See alsoEdit
- Constructed language
- Knowledge representation and reasoning
- Natural language processing
- Controlled vocabulary
- Controlled language in machine translation
- Structured English
- Word-sense disambiguation
- Simple English Wikipedia