The utility of formal theories of commonsense reasoning will depend both on their competency in solving problems and on their conceptual coverage. We argue that the problems of coverage and competency can be decoupled and solved with different methods for a given commonsense domain. We describe a methodology for identifying the coverage requirements of theories through the large-scale analysis of planning strategies, with further refinements made by collecting and categorizing instances of natural language expressions pertaining to the domain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology in identifying the representational coverage requirements of theories of the commonsense psychology of human memory. We then apply traditional methods of formalization to produce a formal first-order theory of commonsense memory with a high degree of competency and coverage.

We outline an approach for transferring specifications and technical documents written in plain English into controlled English. In a first step, we analyse the sentences of the source documents and (partially) translate them into a set of logical forms. In the second step, we send the logical forms to a surface-form generation module that plans how the sentences of the controlled language should be composed and how the surface string should be realised. The result is an explicit interpretation of the source document in controlled English that can be refined in a stepwise manner by the authors until it corresponds to their intended interpretation.

This report proposes a two-dimensional, visual, direct manipulation query language intended to be used as an alternate modality to natural language in a multimodal interface. The language focuses on the visualisation of the logic of queries, and is intended to be flexible, extensible, and to have at least the expressive power of first order predicate logic with constraints. The language provides a basis for future inclusion of higher order logic (and thus a framework for database navigation within the language itself), and generalised quantifiers. As far as we have been able to judge, no such visual language of equal expressive power already exists. A "proof of concept" prototype has been implemented that illustrates most of the key concepts of the language.