An Account of Constructions in ASD-STE100: Formalizing Non-Propositional Meaning in Aviation Instructional Texts

Authors

  • Ana Díaz-Galán Instituto de Lingüística Andrés Bello. Universidad de La Laguna http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3355-140X
  • María del Carmen Fumero-Pérez Instituto de Lingüística Andrés Bello. Universidad de La Laguna

Abstract

Constructional meaning is essential to understand any piece of natural language, its formalization, however, poses challenges that have to be faced for an adequate processing of natural language. This paper addresses this issue by providing a formalized description of the role that constructional structures play in the controlled language ASD-STE100. Based on a corpus of instructional texts written in this language, we will assess the existence in these texts of the four levels of constructional meaning described by the Lexical Constructional Model (Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal-Usón, 2008; Mairal-Usón & Ruiz de Mendoza, 2009) which, in turn, shape the Constructicons in the FunGramKB knowledge base (Periñán-Pascual, 2013; Periñán-Pascual & Arcas-Túnez, 2014). Our findings show that the technical nature of the controlled language has direct influence on the type of constructions employed, making some of the constructional levels irrelevant. A formalized account of the main types of constructions encountered is also provided.

Author Biographies

Ana Díaz-Galán, Instituto de Lingüística Andrés Bello. Universidad de La Laguna

La Dra. Díaz-Galán ha sido miembro del equipo investigador del Proyecto FF12011-29798-C02-02 Aplicación en los sistemas de recuperación de la información en entornos multilingües en el seno del cual ha participado en la implementación de los componentes léxicos y gramaticales (especialmente los denominados «Constructicones») que conforman el módulo lingüístico de la base de conocimiento FunGramKB. También ha colaborado en la creación de reglas sintácticas y léxicas del parseador morfo-sintagmático de ARTEMIS, un analizador sintáctico-semántico diseñado para obtener la estructura conceptual subyacente a un fragmento de lenguaje natural. Este trabajo se ha difundido tanto en congresos internacionales como en distintas publicaciones indexadas.

María del Carmen Fumero-Pérez, Instituto de Lingüística Andrés Bello. Universidad de La Laguna

La Dra. María del Carmen Fumero-Pérez ha centrado su labor investigadora en los últimos años en el desarrollo e implementación de los componentes léxicos y ontológico de la base de conocimiento FunGramKB (Functional Grammar Knowledge Base); en el marco del proyecto FF12011-29798-C02-02 Aplicación en los sistemas de recuperación de la información en entornos multilingües, y, más recientemente, en el diseño de las reglas que conforman ARTEMIS, un analizador sintáctico-semántico que permite construir la estructura lógica conceptual de una oración de entrada. Son muestra de ello diversas comunicaciones a congresos internacionales, así como numerosos artículos en revistas internacionales

References

Amazon. (2019). Alexa Skills. Retrieved from: https://www.amazon.com/alexa-skills/b?ie=UTF8&node=13727921011

ANSI Z535 [n.d] Retrieved from: https://www.standardsportal.org/usa_en/sdo/nema.aspx

BrothervsBrother [n.d] Video. Hilarious Amazon Alexa Fail [YouTube channel]. Hilarious Amazon Alexa Fail. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HmAYclRf4g

Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe. (2017). ASD-STE Simplified Technical English Specification STE-100. International specification for the preparation of technical documentation in a controlled language. Issue 7, January 2017. Brussels.

BrothervsBrother [n.d] Video. Hilarious Amazon Alexa Fail [YouTube channel]. Hilarious Amazon Alexa Fail. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HmAYclRf4g

ChadBockius [n.d] Video. The I’m bored Alexa Skill [YouTube channel]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=auDmIc-C0Q4

Del Campo Martínez, N. (2012). A constructional account of advising: Construal operations and social conventions. ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 34(1), 115-132.

Del Campo Martínez, N. & Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. (2012). A constructionist approach to illocution: The case of orders. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 45, 13-31.

Felices-Lago, A. & Alameda-Hernández, A. (2017). The process of building the upper-level hierarchy for the aircraft structure ontology to be integrated in FunGramKB. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos, 23(2), 86-110. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.20420/rlfe.2017.174

Felices Lago, A. & Fernández Lloret, D. (2012). New Applications of Genre Analysis to Technical Manuals: The Perspectives of Bhatian and Lassen Models. New York: Edwin Mellen Press Lewiston.

Fumero-Pérez, M.C. & Díaz-Galán, A. (2017). The interaction of parsing rules and argument-predicate constructions: Implications for the structure of the Grammaticon in FunGramKB. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas, 12, 33-44. doi: https://doi.org/10.4995/rlyla.2017.5406

Instruct (n.d.). In Collins Cobuild English Dictionary Online. Retrieved January 8, 2020, from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/instruct

Instruct (n.d.). In Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved January 8, 2020, from https://www.oed.com/

Jiménez-Briones, R. (2016). A computational account of illocutionary meaning. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 4, 51-60. doi: https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.04.06

Luzondo-Oyón, A. & Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. (2015). Argument-structure in a natural language processing environment. Language Sciences, 48, 70-89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2015.01.001

Luzondo-Oyón, A. & Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. (2017). Argument-structure and implicational constructions in knowledge in a knowledge base. Onomázein, 35(04), 25-48. doi: 10.7764/onomazein.35.04

Mairal-Usón, R. (2012). La arquitectura de una base de conocimiento léxico-conceptual: Implicaciones lingüísticas. In M. Giammatteo, L. Ferrarri & H. Albano (Eds.), Léxico y Sintaxis (pp. 183-210). Editorial FFyL, UNCuyo.

Mairal-Usón, R. (2015). Constructional meaning representation within a knowledge engineering framework. Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, 13(1), 1-27.

Mairal-Usón, R. (2017). A computational implementation of idiomatic and non-idiomatic constructions. Signos, 50(94), 242-264. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-09342017000200241.

Mairal-Usón, R. & Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. (2009). Levels of description and explanation in meaning construction. In C. Butler & J. Martín Arista (Eds.), Deconstructing Constructions (pp. 153-198). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Martín-Díaz, M.A. (2019). Parsing adverbial complex sentences in ASD-STE100 within ARTEMIS. Complutense Journal of English Studies, 27, 159-181. doi: https://doi.org/10.5209/cjes.61076

Martín-Díaz, M.A. & González-Orta, M. (2020). Clausal arguments and peripheries in ASD-STE100: The parsing of subordination in ARTEMIS. In consideration.

Nickl, M. (2018). Instructional texts: Learn how to get things done. In J. Humbley & C. Lauren (Eds.), Languages for Special Purposes (pp. 321-342). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Periñán-Pascual, C. (2013). Towards a model of constructional meaning for natural language understanding. John Benjamins. In B. Nolan & E. Diedrichsen (Eds.), Linking Constructions into Functional Linguistics: The role of Constructions in Grammar (pp. 205-230). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Periñán-Pascual, C. & Arcas-Túnez, F. (2014). The implementation of the CLS constructor in ARTEMIS. In B. Nolan & C. Periñán-Pascual (Eds.), Language Processing and Grammars the Role of Functionally Oriented Computational Models (pp. 164-196). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Periñán-Pascual, C. & Mairal-Usón, R. (2010). La gramática de COREL: Un lenguaje de representación conceptual. Onomázein, 21(2010/1), 11-45.

Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. & Galera Masegosa, A. (2014). Cognitive Modeling: A Linguistic Perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. & Gómez González, M.A. (2014). Constructing discourse and discourse construction. In M.A. Gómez González, J.R. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & F. Gonzálvez-García (Eds.), Theory and Practice in Functional-Cognitive Space (pp. 295-314). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. & Mairal-Usón, R. (2008). Levels of description and constraining factors in meaning construction: An introduction to the Lexical Constructional Model. Folia Linguística, 42(2), 355-400.

Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schwitter, R. (2010). Controlled natural languages for knowledge representation. In C.R. Huang & D. Jurafsky (Eds.), COLING '10: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters (pp. 1113–1121). Beijing: Coling 2010 Organizing Committee.

Van Valin, R. (2005). Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Valin, R. & Mairal-Usón, R. (2014). Interfacing the lexicon and an ontology in a linking system. In M.A. Gómez González, F.J. Ruiz de Mendoza & F. Gonzálvez-García (Eds.), Theory and Practice in Functional-cognitive Space (pp. 205-228). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Van Valin, R. & LaPolla, R. (1997). Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Warn. (n.d.). In Collins Cobuild English Dictionary Online. Retrieved January 8, 2020, from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/warn

Warn. (n.d.). In Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved January 8, 2020 https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/225791?rskey=EIuvWL&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid

Enero-diciembre 2020

Downloads

Published

2020-06-29

Issue

Vol. 19 No. 1 (2020)

Section

Artículos Nuevos

License

Attribution - Non-commercial (CC BY-NC). Under this license the user can copy, distribute and publicly display the work and can create derivative works as long as these new creations acknowledge the authorship of the original work and are not used commercially.

Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions.