Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are subsets of

natural language A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...

s that are obtained by restricting the grammar and vocabulary in order to reduce or eliminate

ambiguity Ambiguity is the type of meaning (linguistics), meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several interpretations; others describe it as a concept or statement that has no real reference. A com ...

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. The first type of languages (often called "simplified" or "technical" languages), for example ASD Simplified Technical English, Caterpillar Technical English,

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

'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

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but so ...

s", "Only use dictionary-approved words", and "Use only the

active voice Active voice is a grammatical voice prevalent in many of the world's languages. It is the default voice for clauses that feature a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most Indo-European languages ...

". The second type of languages have a formal syntax and formal semantics, and can be mapped to an existing

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "alphabet". The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols that concatenate into strings (also c ...

, such as

first-order logic First-order logic, also called predicate logic, predicate calculus, or quantificational logic, is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantified variables over ...

. Thus, those languages can be used as knowledge representation languages, and writing of those languages is supported by fully automatic

consistency In deductive logic, a consistent theory is one that does not lead to a logical contradiction. A theory T is consistent if there is no formula \varphi such that both \varphi and its negation \lnot\varphi are elements of the set of consequences ...

and redundancy checks, query answering, etc.

Languages

Existing controlled natural languages include: * ASD Simplified Technical English * Attempto Controlled English * Aviation English *

Basic English Basic English (a backronym for British American Scientific International and Commercial English) is a controlled language based on standard English, but with a greatly simplified vocabulary and grammar. It was created by the linguist and philo ...

ClearTalk ClearTalk is a controlled natural language—a kind of a formal language for expressing information that is designed to be both human-readable (being based on English) and easily processed by a computer. Anyone who can read English can immediat ...

Common Logic Common Logic (CL) is a framework for a family of logic languages, based on first-order logic, intended to facilitate the exchange and transmission of knowledge in computer-based systems. The CL definition permits and encourages the development ...

Controlled English * Distributed Language Translation Esperanto * Easy Japanese * E-Prime *

Français fondamental is a list of words and grammatical concepts, devised in the beginning of the 1950s for teaching foreigners and residents of the French Union, France's colonial empire. A series of investigations in the 1950s and 1960s showed that a small number o ...

* Gellish Formal English * Interlingua-IL sive

Latino sine flexione Latino sine flexione ("Latin without inflections"), Interlingua de Academia pro Interlingua (IL de ApI) or Peano's Interlingua (abbreviated as IL) is an international auxiliary language compiled by the Academia pro Interlingua under the chairmansh ...

(

Giuseppe Peano Giuseppe Peano (; ; 27 August 1858 – 20 April 1932) was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much Mathematical notati ...

) * Logical English * ModeLang *

Newspeak In the dystopian novel '' Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (also published as ''1984''), by George Orwell, Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate. To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in O ...

(fictional) * Processable English (PENG) *

Seaspeak Seaspeak is a controlled natural language (CNL) based on English, designed to facilitate communication between ships whose captains' native tongues differ. It has now been formalised as Standard Marine Communication Phrases (SMCP). While genera ...

Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a bus ...

Special English Learning English (previously known as Special English) is a controlled version of the English language first used on October 19, 1959, and still presented daily by the United States broadcasting service Voice of America (VOA). World news and oth ...

Encoding

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

has reserved as a BCP 47 variant subtag for simplified versions of languages.

References

External links

Controlled Natural Languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Controlled Natural Language Natural language processing

Languages

Encoding

See also

References

External links