Language to Logic Translation with PhraseBank

We discuss a restricted natural language understanding system and a proposed extension to it, which is a corpus of phrases. The Controlled English to Logic Translation (CELT) system allows users to make statements in a domain-independent, restricted English grammar that have a clear formal semantics and that are amenable to machine processing. CELT needs a large amount of linguistic and semantic knowledge. It is currently coupled with the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology, which has been mapped by hand to WordNet 1.6. We propose work on a new corpus of phrases (called PhraseBank) to be added to WordNet and linked to SUMO, which will catalog common English phrase forms, and their deep meaning in terms of the formal ontology. This addition should signicantly expand the coverage and usefulness of CELT.