Inheritance, Defaults and the Lexicon

by Edited by Ted Briscoe , Ann Copestake , Valeria de Paiva

• ISBN13: 9780521430272
• ISBN10: 0521430275
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-01-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The lexicon is now a major focus of research in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), as more linguistic theories concentrate on the lexicon and as the acquisition of an adequate vocabulary has become the chief bottleneck in developing practical NLP systems. This collection describes techniques of lexical representation within a unification-based framework and their linguistic application, concentrating on the highly topical issue of structuring the lexicon using inheritance and defaults. Topics covered include typed feature structures, default unification, lexical rules, multiple inheritance and non-monotonic reasoning. The contributions describe both theoretical results and implemented languages and systems, including DATR, the Stuttgart TFS and ISSCO's ELU. This book arose out of a workshop on default inheritance in the lexicon organized as a part of the Esprit ACQUILEX project on computational lexicography. Besides the contributed papers mentioned above, it contains a detailed description of the ACQUILEX lexical knowledge base (LKB) system and its use in the representation of lexicons extracted semi-automatically from machine-readable dictionaries.

Table of Contents

Introduction

A practical approach to multiple default inheritance for unification-based lexicons

Prioritised multiple inheritance in DATR

Issues in the design of a language for representing linguistic information based on inheritance and feature structures

Skeptical and credulous default unification with applications to templates and inheritance

Norms or inference tickets - a frontal collision between intuitions

A feature-based lexicon

The LKB: a system for representing lexical information extracted from machine-readable dictionaries

Types and constraints in the LKB

Inheritance and structure sharing in the verb class hierarchy

Untangling definition structure into knowledge representation.