Logic and Feature Structures

Feature structures play an important role in linguistic knowledge representation in computational linguistics. Given the proliferation of different feature structure formalisms it is useful to have a "common language" to express them in. This paper shows how a variety of feature structures and constraints on them can be expressed in predicate logic (except for the use of circumscription for non-monotonic devices), including sorted feature values, subsumption constraints and the non-monotonic ANY values and "constraint equations". Many feature systems can be completely axiomatized in the Schonfinkel-Bernays class of first-order formulae, so the decidability of the satisfiability and validity problems for these systems follows immediately.

Authors

• Mark Johnson

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