Controlled Language for Everyday Use: The MOLTO Phrasebook

摘要

Controlled languages are usually targeted for technical domains and designed to be unambiguous. This paper presents a controlled language whose domain is touristic phrases, aimed to be usable by anyone without prior training. Despite its informal nature, the language of phrases has a firm notion of semantics, defining the correctness of translations. However, this semantics is formulated in terms of context and situation rather than by logical formulas. Moreover, the language is often ambiguous, and the translation may depend on resolving the ambiguity. This paper shows how to formalize a semantics for tourist phrases and implement it in 15 languages, how to deal with the ambiguities, and how to make the system available for layman users on the web and on mobile phones. While a useful application as such, the Phrasebook also paves the way for an extended notion of controlled language, and the techniques are aimed to be general enough to support many such extensions.