Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2024-05-23T16:35:51.323Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Unification as a Grammatical Tool*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Lauri Carlson
Affiliation:
RUCL, University of Helsinki, Hallituskatu 11, SF-00100 Helsinki, Finland.
Krister Linden
Affiliation:
RUCL, University of Helsinki, Hallituskatu 11, SF-00100 Helsinki, Finland.
Get access

Abstract

The present paper is an introduction to unification as a formalism for writing grammars for natural languages. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 briefly describes the history and the current scene of unification based grammar formalisms. Sections 2–3 describe the basic design of current formalisms. Section 4 constitutes a tutorial introduction to a representative unification based grammar formalism, the D–PATR system of Karttunen (1986). Sections 5—6 consider extensions of the unification formalism and its limitations. Section 7 examines implementation questions and addresses the question of the computational complexity of unification. — Some notes on terminology.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ades, A. E. & Steedman, M. J. 1982. On the Order of Words. Linguistics and Philosophy 4/4, 517558.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, D. 1986. An European Perspective on MT. In Proceedings of the IEEE, 979992.Google Scholar
Boyer, R. S. & Moore, J. S. 1972. The Sharing of Structure in Theorem-Proving Programs. Machine Intelligence 7, 101116.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J. 1978. A Realistic Transformational Grammar. In Halle, M., Bresnan, J. & Miller, G. A. (eds.), Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 159.Google Scholar
Carlson, L. 1986. LP Rules in Unification Grammar. In Karlsson, F. (ed.), Papers from the Fifth Scandinauian Conference of Computational Linguistics. Department of General Linguistics Publications 15, University of Helsinki. 3548.Google Scholar
Colmerauer, A. 1978. Metamorphosis Grammars. In Bols, L. (ed.), Natural Language Communication with Computers. Berlin: Springer Verlag.Google Scholar
Colmerauer, A. 1979. Les Bases Théoriques de Prolog. Technical Report, Groupe d'Intelligence Artificielle, U.E.R. de Luminy, Université d'Aix-Marseille II.Google Scholar
Dahi, V. 1985. Hiding Complexity from the Casual Writer of Parsers. In Dahl, V. & Saint-Dizier, P. (eds.), Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming. North Holland: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Flickinger, D., Pollard, C. & Wasow, T. 1985. Structure-sharing in Lexical Representations. In ACL Proceedings, 23rd Annual Meeting, University of Chicago. Chicago, Illinois: ACL 262267.Google Scholar
Gazdar, G. 1982. Phrase Structure Grammar. In Jacobson, P. & Pullum, G. (eds.), The Nature of Syntactic Representation. Dordrecht: Reidel. 131186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gazdar, G., Klein, E., Pullum, G. & Sag, I. 1985. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell and Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kaplan, R. 1973. A General Syntactic Processor. In Rustin, R. (ed.), Natural Language Processing. New York: Algorithmics Press, 193241.Google Scholar
Kaplan, R. & Bresnan, J. 1982. Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation. In Bresnan, J. (ed.), The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 173281.Google Scholar
Kaplan, R., Maxwell, J. & Zaenen, A. 1987. Functional Uncertainty in LFG. CLSI Monthly 2/4, Stanford.Google Scholar
Karttunen, L. 1979. Features and Values. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Stanford, California: Stanford University.Google Scholar
Karttunen, L. 1986. D–PATR: A Development Environment for Unification- based Grammars. In Proceedings of COLING 1986. University of Bonn.Google Scholar
Karttunen, L. 1986. Radical Lexicalism. Paper presented at the Conference on Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure, 07 1986. New York. Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, and CSLI, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Kay, M. 1983, Unification Grammar. Technical Report. Palo Alto, California: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.Google Scholar
Kay, M. 1985. Parsing in Functional Unification Grammar. In Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 251278.Google Scholar
Pereira, F. 1983. Logic for Natural Language Analysis. Technical Note 275. Artificial Intelligence Center: SRI International, Menlo Park, California.Google Scholar
Pereira, F. 1984. A Structure-Sharing Representation for Unification-Based Grammar Formalisms. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Stanford, California: Stanford University.Google Scholar
Pereira, F. 1981. Extraposition Grammars. American Journal of Computational Linguistics 7/4, 243256.Google Scholar
Pereira, F. & Warren, D. 1983. Parsing as Deduction. Technical Note 295. Artificial Intelligence Center: SRI International, Menlo Park, California.Google Scholar
Pereira, F. & Warren, D. 1980. Definite Clause Grammars For Language Analysis: A Survey of the Formalism and Comparison with Augmented Transition Networks. Artificial Intelligence 13, 231278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollard, C. 1984. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Head Grammars, and Natural Languages. Ph.D. Thesis. Stanford University: Stanford, California.Google Scholar
Robinson, J. 1965. A Machine-oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle. J. Assoc. Comput. Mach. 12, 2341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shieber, S. 1985. An Introduction to Unification-Based Approaches to Grammar. Paper presented as a Tutorial Session at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Shieber, S., Karttunen, L. & Pereira, F. 1984. Notes From the Unification Underground: A Compilation of Papers on Unification-Based Grammar Formalisms. Technical Report 327. Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International: Menlo Park, California.Google Scholar
Shieber, S., Uszkoreit, H., Pereira, F., Robinson, J. & Tyson, M. 1983. The Formalism and Implementation of PATR–II. In Research on Interactive Acquisition and Use of Knowledge. Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International: Menlo Park, California.Google Scholar