Towards Structural Natural Language Formalization: Mapping Discourse to Controlled Natural Language

TL;DR

This paper explores a pipeline approach to convert natural language discourse structures into controlled natural language statements, enabling ontology-based reasoning through existing NLP and reduction techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pipeline combining syntax-to-semantics mapping and reduction rules for formalizing natural language discourse into controlled language.

Findings

Demonstrates feasibility of mapping discourse to controlled language

Evaluates potential for ontology-based reasoning

Discusses limitations and future improvements

Abstract

The author describes a conceptual study towards mapping grounded natural language discourse representation structures to instances of controlled language statements. This can be achieved via a pipeline of preexisting state of the art technologies, namely natural language syntax to semantic discourse mapping, and a reduction of the latter to controlled language discourse, given a set of previously learnt reduction rules. Concludingly a description on evaluation, potential and limitations for ontology-based reasoning is presented.