Abstract
Within a framework for enriched on-line discussion forums for e-government policy-making, pro and con statements for positions are input, structurally related, then logically represented and evaluated. The framework builds on current technologies for multi-threaded discussion, natural language processing, ontologies, and formal argumentation frameworks. This paper focuses on the natural language processing of statements in the framework. A small sample policy discussion is presented. We adopt and apply a controlled natural language (Attempto Controlled English) to constrain the domain of discourse, eliminate ambiguity and unclarity, allow a logical representation of statements which supports inference and consistency checking, and facilitate information extraction. Each of the policy statements is automatically translated into first-order logic. The result is a logical representation of the policy discussion which we can query, draw inferences (given ground statements), test for consistency, and extract detailed information.
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Wyner, A., van Engers, T., Bahreini, K. (2010). From Policy-Making Statements to First-Order Logic. In: Andersen, K.N., Francesconi, E., Grönlund, Å., van Engers, T.M. (eds) Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective. EGOVIS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6267. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15172-9_5
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