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Abstract:
Ogden's Basic English (OBE) precedes modern controlled
languages by half a century, yet it remains the most
strikingly minimal. It is distinguished by having only
eighteen verbs, enriching these with particles to help
construct compound verbs. OBE has been shown through teaching
practice to be simple, adequate and quite natural, even if the
original 850 word lexicon deserves a little revision and the
style of composition is reminiscent of a niave learner of
English.
So for native speaker OBE is slightly cumbersome constraint.
But as a potential core language for human interaction with
software agents and robots OBE offers the attractions of a
minimal lexicon for experimental development and the challenge
in explicating Ogden's informal language.
Here we propose an agent-based computational semantics for
interactive dialogue in OBE, exploiting its small set of verbs
and objectification of concepts to help ground the rules of a
semantic grammar which uses thematic as well as logical
concepts in composition, and with an agent-oriented ontology.
We observe some prescience in Odgens advocacy of particles,
discover that the structure of the OBE lexicon even helps
provide insight into the architecture of a computational agent
for human language, and that the OBE scholastic community may
already be providing support for future human interaction with
such agents. |
