Parsing for Targeted Errors in Controlled Languages

The use of Controlled Languages in technical documentation is becoming a large concern for many organisations. Authoring texts which conform to these speciications is a problematic process: the language deenition may be vague, the most immediate grammatical construction may not be permitted and so on. Technological support for the writing process may ooer a number of aids, including style, or grammar, checkers. The ability to recognise variations to the prescribed grammar is at the heart of such systems. This paper presents a variation on the chart parsing method which encodes the grammar as nite state automata productions instead of a linear description of constituents. The system allows the grammar writer to deene a number of variations to a grammar rule, in the form of targeted insertions and deletions, which are represented as transformations to the automata.