From Cogram to Alcogram: Toward a Controlled English Grammar Checker
Summary
The authors work on Controlled English (CE) for technical documentation in telecommunications. Such a language is meant to make texts unambiguous and simpler for human readers, especially non-native speakers of English, and also for machine translation. Experience with the METAL system showed that it does not pay to keep making the analysis grammar more complex to handle badly written sentences. By contrast, even simple prior control of the input text noticeably improves translation. The authors first traced the origins of CE back to Caterpillar Fundamental English and compared three corporate manuals: AECMA, Ericsson English and IBM. All three turned out to be incomplete, with a weak linguistic foundation and vague rules. The authors therefore created their own grammar, COGRAM, with about 150 rules, and then restructured it into an algorithmic version, ALCOGRAM. In this version, checking proceeds in stages, from the text level down to fine details, and stylistic rules are built into every stage. Based on ALCOGRAM, they built a CALL training program, which is being tested at Alcatel-Bell. The planned next step is an automatic grammar and style checker. The work shows how to turn paper guidelines into a formalized resource suitable for NLP tools.
Key points
- Three grammars were selected for the comparative analysis: AECMA Simplified English, Ericsson English and the IBM manuals. They were compared on four groups of criteria: spelling and vocabulary, syntax, style, and completeness and readability. The authors were unable to obtain the grammar of the PEP branch.
- COGRAM contains about 150 rules. ALCOGRAM divides control into four blocks: text-level (PTCA), syntactic (SCA), lexical (LCA) and micro-control (MCA). Micro-control covers, among other things, numbers, references, enumerations and omitted words.
- The CALL application is written in CLIPPER: 25 files totaling about 2.5 MB, running under MS-Windows on a 386 SX-class PC. The program asks the author questions and suggests how to rewrite a passage.
- The future checker is planned to be integrated into the Interleaf DTP environment and may use the English analysis grammar from METAL. The style-checking experiments in the ESPRIT Translator's Workbench project serve as a reference point.
- The research was funded by Alcatel Bell in 1989–1991. The appendix gives an example of a technical text before and after it was brought into line with the CE rules.
Cited by
Cite
@inproceedings{adriaens1992cogram,
title = {{From Cogram to Alcogram: Toward a Controlled English Grammar Checker}},
author = {Adriaens, Geert and Schreurs, Dirk},
booktitle = {COLING 1992 Volume 2: The 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
year = {1992},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/C92-2090/}
}References
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