Off-line parsability and the well-foundedness of subsumption

Shuly Wintner; Nissim Francez

doi:10.1023/A:1008252619710

Off-line parsability and the well-foundedness of subsumption

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Typed feature structures are used extensively for the specification of linguistic information in many formalisms. The subsumption relation orders TFSs by their information content. We prove that subsumption of acyclic TFSs is well founded, whereas in the presence of cycles general TFS subsumption is not well founded. We show an application of this result for parsing, where the well-foundedness of subsumption is used to guarantee termination for grammars that are off-line parsable. We define a new version of off-line parsability that is less strict than the existing one; thus termination is guaranteed for parsing with a larger set of grammars.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-16
Number of pages	16
Journal	Journal of Logic, Language and Information
Volume	8
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008252619710
State	Published - 1999
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work is supported by a grant from the Israeli Ministry of Science: “Programming Languages Induced Computational Linguistics.” The work of the second author was also partially supported by the Fund for the Promotion of Research in the Technion. We wish to thank the anonymous referees for their enlightening comments.

Keywords

Computational linguistics
Feature structures
Parsing
Unification

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science (miscellaneous)
Philosophy
Linguistics and Language

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10.1023/A:1008252619710

Cite this

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AU - Francez, Nissim

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Off-line parsability and the well-foundedness of subsumption

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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