Good question David,

The interpreter must have a wide vocabulary of meanings to be interpreted in the way the DE expects them to be interpreted. Where the interpretation is debatable, it should be thrown back to the engineering team to fix the inappropriate interpretation.

This leads to possible inconsistencies and lots of ambiguities in real operations, so this is not a good technology for dangerous mission critical applications. Instead, the first few widespread uses of CNLs will likely be in areas where the DE is simply overworked, and the CNL somehow will help reduce the volume of work, or process a large fraction of otherwise correctable descriptions.

Personally, I prefer working with analysis of English in structured database forms, such as the PTO database, where each English statement has some kind of narrowing predication about what kinds of things the statements can describe.

For example, in patents, there are a couple dozen fields of structured information – patent number, first inventor, PTO classification, filing date, and so forth. To that, I add the context words (those that are not commonly used “noise” words with very simple syntactic roles). The context words are appropriate for identifying the context of each patent, and measuring similarity of one patent to another in very formal ways, i.e., through claim construal.

But most text is written in REAL English, not in CNL, so the problem is to fit the entire database into a vocabulary of CNL which can be disambiguated by the observable context.

JMHO,

Adrian -