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CENode

Posted on 22 June 2017

Whilst working on the ITA Project [1] - a collaborative research programme between the UK MoD and the US Army Research Laboratory - over the last few years, one of my primary areas has been to research around controlled natural languages, and working with Cardiff University [2] and IBM UK [3]'s Emerging Technology [4] team to develop CENode.

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As part of the project - before I joined - researchers at IBM developed the CEStore [5], which aims to provide tools for working with ITA Controlled English [6]. Controlled English (CE) is a subset of the English language which is structured in a way that attempts to remove ambiguity from statements, enabling machines to understand 'English'

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inputs.

Such a language was developed partly to support multi-agent systems consisting of a mixture of humans and machines, and to allow each agent to be able to communicate with one another using the same protocol in coalition scenarios. In these systems, there may be agents on the ground who submit information to the CEStore in CE, which is able to parse and understand the inputs. The CEStore may then pass the information on to other interested parties or may give an agent (such as a drone,

camera, sensor, or other equipment) a task (follow, intersect, watch, etc.) based on the complement of the existing knowledge and the new input.

An old example [7] we use combines the CEStore with a system capable of assigning missions to sensors or equipment (see this paper [8]). This example focuses on 'John Smith', who is known to the CE system as a HVT (high-value target) owning a black car with licence plate 'ABC 123'. A human agent on the ground may later observe a speeding car and issue information into the system through an interface on their mobile device or via a microphone;

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