Complex Objects Need Complex Text to Describe Them

 

What is complex text?

Complex text contains complex objects rendered in words – an aircraft, a tank, a warship. The words become a clump as the physical attributes and the behaviour is described, with new clumps becoming assemblages of smaller clumps.

Wordgroups

Wordgroups are clumps of words recognised as a single object:

                Ambient temperature

Repairs and Maintenance

Wordgroups can be made up of wordgroups (apologies that it is a banking example):

                Multiple-institution person‑to‑person electronic funds transfer instruction

The function of a wordgroup can be described, using words and wordgroups

 For the purposes of this Act, if:

                     (a)  a person (the payer) instructs a person (the ordering institution) to transfer money controlled by the payer to a third person (the payee) on the basis that the transferred money will be made available to the payee by:

                              (i)  being credited to an account held by the payee with a fourth person (the beneficiary institution); or

                             (ii)  being paid to the payee by a fourth person (the beneficiary institution); and

                     (b)  either:

                              (i)  the transfer is to be carried out wholly or partly by means of one or more electronic communications; or

                             (ii)  the transfer instruction is to be passed on wholly or partly by means of one or more electronic communications; and

                     (c)  the ordering institution is:

                              (i)  an ADI; or

                             (ii)  a bank; or

                            (iii)  a building society; or

                            (iv)  a credit union; or

                             (v)  a person specified in the AML/CTF Rules; and

                     (d)  the beneficiary institution is:

                              (i)  an ADI; or

                             (ii)  a bank; or

                            (iii)  a building society; or

                            (iv)  a credit union; or

                             (v)  a person specified in the AML/CTF Rules;

then:

                     (e)  the instruction is a multiple‑institution person‑to‑person electronic funds transfer instruction; and

                      (f)  if there are one or more persons interposed between the ordering institution and the beneficiary institution—disregard those interposed persons in working out the identities of the following:

                              (i)  the payer;

                             (ii)  the ordering institution;

                            (iii)  the payee;

                            (iv)  the beneficiary institution.

 

The definition of the wordgroup provides the “guts”, and will be used to control its activation.

The point is not so much what this specific example does, but how an active procedure can be described in English, and the words that make it up can be turned into pieces of machinery that do exactly what the words say, with no programming involvement.

An Instance of Clumping

Sometimes adjectives are independent, and separately act on the attributes of a common object. A large black car. The order is unimportant, but conventional – “a black large car” sounds wrong.

Sometimes an adjective operates on an object to its right to change its state, so it is necessary to create the object to be acted upon, which includes the effects of adjectives, prepositional phrases, relative pronoun clauses, participial phrases, and clumping, in the right order.

Each word in the text becomes a child of the word, its part of speech, and subcategorisation (relational adverb, transitive verb), and the particular meaning of the word in that context. The machine has to support all the things we do unconsciously.

The phasing of adjectives and prepositional phrases becomes important for complex objects.

All these things are done without thinking for you now, and you don’t pay it much heed. In a large and complex text, small differences between people’s unconscious understandings can (and do) lead to big stuffups. Showing exactly what is intended (and letting people see what they think are mistakes) can lead to a much more successful project.