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

Abstract

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.