CONTROL STRUCTURES FOR ACTIONS IN PROCEDURAL TEXTS AND PT-CHART.pdf

CONTROL STRUCTURES FOR ACTIONS IN PROCEDURAL TEXTS AND PT-CHART Yoshio Momouchi DIVISION OF INFORMATION ENGINEERING FACULTY OF ENGINEERING, HOKKAIDO UNIVERSITY SAPPORO 060, JAPAN This paper describes a partial taxonomy of control structures for actions in procedural texts. On the basis of the taxonomy, we examine natural language expressions for control struc- tures in Japanese procedural texts and present PT (Procedural Text) -chart which represents the structure of a procedural text. Introduction Cookbooks, route instructions, machine assembly instructions and algorism descriptions , which are written in natural languages, and sorting programs, which are written in program- ming languages, are examples of procedural texts. There are many points at which natural language procedural texts and programs may be considered on common ground. A procedure is composed of a sequence of actions intended to achieve a goal. Control structures determine patterns of behavior for action se- quences. An action is something an actor does or can do. An action is enabled by certain states. An action acts on objects and causes the change of states of objects. In programs, such concepts as objects, states, actions and control structures are defined explicitly. How are these concepts identified in natural language texts? What expressions represent these concepts? We think it most nec- essary that we have a right understanding of these concepts to understand procedural texts. In Japanese procedural texts, actions are mostly expressed by verbs and control structures are expressed by nouns, adverbs, auxiliary verbs, postpositional words and so on. The primary verb is a procedure call in programs. Other syntac- tic structures are used to embed the procedure call information. Control structures in natural language procedural texts are more complex and richer than in programs. The control information is embeded within broad range of syntactic struct