Abstract
Unification-based grammar formalisms have recently received great interest in computational linguistics, because they allow for a very high-level, declarative description of grammatical relations over linguistic objects. Feature structures are used to encode all kinds of information about any given linguistic object, e.g., certain syntactic properties or semantic content. Grammar rules define the relation between surface strings of a language and the information associated with it. Special purpose theorem provers — parsers and generators — operate on these grammar rules to compute this relation in either direction, from a string to a feature structure or vice versa.
Recent formalisms, like the STUF formalism developed and used within the LILOG project at IBM Germany, go even one step further: surface strings are made an integral part of informational structures and general relations can be defined on them. There is no longer a special notion of ‘grammar rule’ relating surface strings to feature structures. Consequently, there is also no parser or generator. A very general inference mechanism evaluates the relational specification when given an input structure representing, e.g., a string. Aspects of controlling the inference process thus become a crucial research topic.
Work on the STUF formalism revealed a lot of interesting similarities between some of the most active research areas in AI: computational linguistics, constraint logic programming, functional programming, and knowledge representation systems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
H. Ait-Kaci. A Lattice Theoretic Approach to Computation Based on a Calculus of Partially Ordered Type Structures. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1984.
H. Ait-Kaci, A. Podelski. Is there a Meaning to LIFE?. Draft of a paper submitted to ICLP ’91.
R. J. Brachman, J. G. Schmölze. An Overview of the KL-ONE Knowledge Representation System. In: Cognitive Science, 9(2):171–216, April 1985.
B. Carpenter. Typed Feature Structures: Inheritance, (In)equality and Extensionality. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Inheritance in Natural Language Processing, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, 1990.
J. Dörre, A. Eisele. Determining Consistency of Feature Terms with Distributed Disjunctions. In: D. Metzing (ed.): GWAI-89, 13th German Workshop on Artificial Intelligence. Informatik- Fachberichte 216, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1989.
J. Dörre, A. Eisele. Feature Logic with Disjunctive Unification. In: Proceedings of the 13th Inter-national Conference on Computational Linguistics, Helsinki, 1990.
J. Dörre, A. Eisele. A Comprehensive Unification-Based Grammar Formalism. Deliverable R3.1.B, DYANA — ESPRIT Basic Research Action BR3175, 1991. to appear.
N. Dershowitz, D. A. Plaisted. Logic Programming cum Applicative Programming Symposium on Logic Programming, IEEE, Boston, 1985.
J. Dörre, W. C. Rounds. On Subsumption and Semi-Unification in Feature Algebras. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, pages 300–310, Philadelphia, PA., 1990.
J. Dörre, I. Raasch. The Stuttgart Type Unification Formalism - User Manual. IWBS Report 168, IBM Deutschland GmbH, Institute for Knowledge Based Systems, 1991.
J. Dörre, R. Seiffert. Sorted Feature Terms and Relational Dependencies. IWBS Report 153, IBM Deutschland GmbH, Institute for Knowledge Based Systems, 1991.
M. Emele, R. Zajac. Typed Unification Grammars. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Con-ference on Computational Linguistics, Helsinki, Finland, 1990.
M. Höhfeld, G. Smolka. Definite Relations Over Constraint Languages. LILOG Report 53, IWBS, IBM Deutschland, Postfach 80 08 80, 7000 Stuttgart 80, W. Germany, October 1988. To appear in the Journal of Logic Programming.
R. M. Kaplan, J. Bresnan. Lexical-Fuctional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Rep-resentation. In: J. Bresnan (ed.): The Mental Representaion of Grammatical Relations, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982.
R. T. Kasper. Feature Structures: A Logical Theory with Application to Language Analysis. PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1987.
M. Kay. Functional Grammar. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, Berkeley, Cal., 1979.
K. Knight. Unification: A Multidisciplinary Survey. In: ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 21, No. 1. pages 93 - 124, March 1989.
R. T. Kasper, W. C. Rounds. A Logical Semantics for Feature Structures. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the ACL, Columbia University, pages 257–265, New York, N.Y., 1986.
B. Nebel, G. Smolka. Representation and Reasoning with Attributive Descriptions. IWBS Report 81, IBM Deutschland GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany, 1989.
C. Pollard, I. A. Sag. Information-Based Syntax and Semantics. CSLI Lecture Notes 13. Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 1987.
M. Reape. A Logical Treatment of Semi-Free Word Order and Bounded Discontinuous Constituency. In: Proceedings of the 4th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 103–110, Manchester, England, 1989.
U. S. Reddy. Narrowing as the Operational Semantics of Functional Languages. Symposium on Logic Programming, IEEE, Boston, 1985.
R. Seiffert. Operationen in erweiterten Typenunifikationsformalismen. LILOG-Report 46, IBM Deutschland GmbH, Stuttgart, 1988.
R. Seiffert. Chart-Parsing of STUF Grammars. To appear in: O. Herzog, C.-R. Rollinger (eds.): Text Understanding in LILOG: Integrating Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1991.
R. Seiffert. Unification-ID/LP Grammars: Formalization and Parsing. To appear in: O. Herzog, C.-R. Rollinger (eds.): Text Understanding in LILOG: Integrating Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1991.
M. J. Shensa. A Computational Structure for the Propositional Calculus. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Detroit, Michigan, USA, 1989.
G. Smolka. A Feature Logic with Subsorts. LILOG Report 33, IWBS, IBM Deutschland, Postfach 80 08 80, 7000 Stuttgart 80, W. Germany, May 1988. To appear in the Journal of Automated Reasoning.
G. Smolka. Feature Constraint Logics for Unification Grammars. IWBS Report 93, IWBS, IBM Deutschland, Postfach 80 08 80, 7000 Stuttgart 80, W. Germany, November 1989. To appear in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Unification Formalisms—Syntax, Semantics and Implementation, Titisee, The MIT Press, 1990.
S. M. Shieber, H. Uszkoreit, F. C. N. Pereira, J. J. Robinson, M. Tyson. The Formalism and Implementation of PATR-II. In: Research on Interactive Acquisition and Use of Knowledge, Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, Cal., 1983.
H. Uszkoreit. Categorial Unification Grammars. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Bonn, 1986.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Seiffert, R. (1991). Unification Grammars: A Unifying Approach. In: Brauer, W., Hernández, D. (eds) Verteilte Künstliche Intelligenz und kooperatives Arbeiten. Informatik-Fachberichte, vol 291. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76980-1_38
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-76980-1_38
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-54617-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-76980-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive