Inheritance and constraint-based grammar formalisms
Published 1 June 1992
Rémi Zajac
Citations41
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.15
SNIP4.16
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
An approach to unification grammars that integrates two paradigms: the object-oriented approach, which offers multiple inheritance, complex objects with role-value restrictions and role-values equality, querying as subsumption; the relational programming approach,Which offers declarativity, logical variables, nondeterminism with backtracking, and existential queries.
Abstract
We describe an approach to unification grammars that integrates two paradigms: the object-oriented approach, which offers multiple inheritance, complex objects with role-value restrictions and role-values equality, querying as subsumption; the relational programming approach, which offers declarativity, logical variables, nondeterminism with backtracking, and existential queries. This approach is embodied in a constraint-based object-oriented formalism. The interpreter of the formalism is described as a term rewriting system based on unification of typed feature structures.The grammar writer organizes unification grammars as inheritance networks of typed feature structures. Complex linguistic structures are described by means of recursive type constraints. We illustrate the use of inheritance networks with two examples: an HPSG example where implication (as used for principles) is modeled using inheritance and an example of bilingual transfer where the minimal amount of information needed for the translation is specified at different levels of generalization.
Keywords
Computer Science
Language<b>Introduction to functional grammar</b> . By M. A. K. Halliday London & Baltimore: Edward Arnold, 1985. Pp. xxxv, 387.
9,924 Citations1989Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen
Cognitive ScienceAn overview of the KL-ONE Knowledge Representation System
1,620 Citations1985R. J. Brachman, James G. Schmolze
The kernel ideas of KL-ONE are presented, emphasizing its ability to form complex structured descriptions, and notions of taxonomy and classification that are central to it are highlighted.
Computer LanguagesDenotational semantics: The scott-strachey approach to programming language theory
1,237 Citations1983
Treats various kinds of languages, beginning with the pure-lambda-calculus and progressing through languages with states, commands, jumps, and assignments.
Constraint satisfaction in logic programming
1,222 Citations1989Pascal Van Hentenryck
The ideas introduced in "Constraint Satisfaction in Logic Programming " have been used successfully to solve more than a dozen practical problems in operations research and circuit design, including disjunctive scheduling, warehouse location, cutting stock car sequencing, and microcode labeling problems.
Medical Entomology and ZoologyInformation-based syntax and semantics
1,066 Citations1987Carl Pollard, Ivan A. Sag
The particular theory presented, head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) - so-called because of its central notion of the grammatical head - is an information-based (or 'unification-based' theory that has its roots in a number of different research programs within linguistics and neighboring disciplines such as philosophy and computer science.
ACM SIGMOD RecordCLASSIC: a structural data model for objects
504 Citations1989Alexander Borgida, Ronald J. Brachman +2 more
A deductive pattern matcher
178 Citations1988Robert M. MacGregor
The design of a pattern matcher for a knowledge representation system called LOOM is described, which is logic-based, with a deductive mechanism which includes a truth-maintenance component as an integral part of the pattern-matching logic.
The Journal of Logic ProgrammingFeature-constraint logics for unification grammars
138 Citations1992Gert Smolka
It is shown that feature-description languages can be captured naturally as sublanguages of first-order predicate logic with equality and the equivalence of a loose Tarski semantics with a fixed feature-graph semantics for quantifier-free constraints is shown.
Machine Translation: A Knowledge-Based Approach
130 Citations1992Sergei Nirenburg, Jaime Carbonell +2 more
The authors introduce the general paradigm of knowledge-based MT, survey major recent developments, compare it with other approaches and present a paradigmatic view of its component processes-natural language analysis, natural language generation, text meaning representation, ontological modeling, etc.
Theoretical Computer ScienceAn algebraic semantics approach to the effective resolution of type equations
123 Citations1986Hassan Aı̈t-Kaci
A method for solving systems of type equations by iterated rewriting of type symbols is proposed which defines an operational semantics for KBL, a Knowledge Base Language, which is shown that a KBL program can be seen as a system of equations.
Cambridge University Press eBooksTerm Rewriting Systems
114 Citations2025Dimitri Ara, Albert Burroni +4 more
Translation by structural correspondences
100 Citations1989Ronald M. Kaplan, Klaus Netter +2 more
An approach to machine translation that exploits the potential of simultaneous correspondences between separate levels of linguistic representation, as formalized in the LFG notion of codescriptions is illustrated.
Shake-and-bake translation
93 Citations1992Pete Whitelock
This chapter presents a novel approach to Machine Translation, called Shake-and-Bake translation, which is based on the idea of grammars as systems of constraints, which allows for the target language expressions to combine freely during generation, providing trivial accounts of phenomena for which structure-based approaches postulate complex transfer, noncompositional Grammars, or undecidable logical inferences.
ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania)A lattice theoretic approach to computation based on a calculus of partially ordered type structures (property inheritance, semantic nets, graph unification)
89 Citations1984Hassan Aı̈t-Kaci
A formal lattice-theoretic calculus of partially ordered type structures where the ordering is meant to reflect subtyping is defined and a model of computation which amounts to solving systems of simultaneous equations in a lattice of types is proposed.
Inference in DATR
85 Citations1989Roger Evans, Gerald Gazdar
This paper presents the syntax and inference mechanisms for the DATR language, a declarative language for representing a restricted class of inheritance networks, permitting both multiple and default inheritance.
Functional Unification Grammar
83 Citations1984Martin Kay
Functional Unification Grammar provides an opportunity to encompass within one formalism and computational system the parts of machine translation systems that have usually been treated separately, natably analysis, transfer, and synthesis.
Journal of Symbolic ComputationInheritance hierarchies: Semantics and unification
68 Citations1989Gert Smolka, Hassan Aı̈t-Kaci
A unitary unification algorithm is specified by a set of simplification rules and proved its soundness and completeness with respect to the model-theoretic semantics and is presented as constraint solving.
Typed unification grammars
67 Citations1990Martin Emele, Rémi Zajac
TFS, a computer formalism in the class of logic formalisms which integrates a powerful type system, is introduced, and it is shown how to make use of the typing system to enforce general constraints and modularize linguistic descriptions.
Lecture notes in computer scienceTowards a meaning of LIFE
59 Citations1991Hassan Aı̈t-Kaci, Andreas Podelski
Generation as structure driven derivation
46 Citations1988Jürgen Wedekind
Two algorithms which construct two different types of generators for lexical functional grammars (LFGs) are described, which generate sentences from functional structures and the second from semantic structures.
Bilingual generation of weather forecasts in an operations environment
41 Citations1990Laurent Bourbeau, D. Carcagno +3 more
In 1986 the first experiments in text generation applied to weather forecasts resulted in a prototype system for producing English marine bulletins from forecast data and during 1988-1989 a full-scale operational system was created to meet the needs of daily marine forecast production for three regional centres in the Canadian Atmospheric Environment Service 1.
Reversible unification based machine translation
24 Citations1990Gertjan van Noord
It will be shown how unification grammars can be used to build a reversible machine translation system and how to obtain a completely reversible MT system using a series of (bidirectional) unification Grammars.
A symmetrical approach to parsing and generation
24 Citations1990Marc Dymetman, Pierre Isabelle +1 more
Lexical Grammars are a class of unification grammars which share a fixed rule component, for which there exists a simple left-recursion elimination transformation.
Unification with lazy non-redundant copying
24 Citations1991Martin Emele
This paper presents a unification procedure which eliminates the redundant copying of structures by using a lazy incremental copying approach to achieve structure sharing.
A transfer model using a typed feature structure rewriting system with inheritance
20 Citations1989Rémi Zajac
A model for transfer in machine translation which uses a rewriting system for typed feature structures and is based on the semantics of typing feature structures as described in [Ait-Kaci 84].
The nondirectional representation of Systemic Functional Grammars and semantics as typed feature structures
16 Citations1992John Bateman, Martin Emele +1 more
A small fragment of the Systemic Functional Grammar of the PENMAN system is reformulated in the Typed Feature Structure language, gaining full reversibility for the SFG description and access for unification-based grammar descriptions to the rich semantic levels of description that SFG supports.
Organizing linguistic knowledge for multilingual generation
13 Citations1990Martin Emele, Ulrich Heid +2 more
An architecture for the organisation of linguistic knowledge is proposed which allows to separately formulate generalizations for different types of linguistic information, and state interrelations between partial information belonging to different levels of description.
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)Classification-Based Programming: A Deep Integration of Frames and Rules
11 Citations1989Yen, John, Robert Neches +1 more
A classification-based programming paradigm is developed and implemented where the rules' LHS and the functionalities of their RHS are represented in the terminological space, which enhances the reasoning capabilities of rule-based systems, but also encourages explicit representation of various kinds of knowledge implicit in rules.
Lecture notes in computer scienceA fixed-point semantics for feature type systems
9 Citations1991Martin Emele, Rémi Zajac
The solution of a set of recursive feature type equations is defined in terms of a fixed-point semantics, which allows for cyclic feature terms, alleviating the need for an “occur-check”.
Processing language with logical types and active constraints
3 Citations1991Patrick Saint‐Dizier
This document presents a language which associates type construction principles to constraint logic programming, and shows that it is very appropriate for language processing, providing more uniform, expressive and efficient tools and treatments.