Gerald Penn

An Optimised Prolog Encoding of Typed Feature Structures


Arbeitspapiere des SFB 340, Bericht Nr. 138 (1999), 19pp.
Postscript (216kb)1-up; Postscript gzip-komprimiert (78kb) 1-up , 2-up.

Abstract

A new Prolog-term-encoding of typed feature structures, a data structure commonly used for natural language processing, is presented that, in many significant cases, allows for faster unification in Prolog implementations of feature-structure-based natural language processing systems, e.g., ALE (Carpenter and Penn 1998). It remains general enough, however, to handle the full range of signatures characterized in Carpenter 1992, a common reference on typed feature logics for computational linguistics, and HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1994), a common linguistic theory based on typed features structures. A logical and empirical comparison is drawn with several alternative encodings.


Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen
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