Incorporating inheritance and feature structures into a logic grammar formalism

Abstract

Hassan Ait-Kaci introduced the Ψ-term, an informational structure resembling feature-based functional structures but which also includes taxonomic inheritance (Ait-Kaci, 1984). We describe Ψ-terms and how they have been incorporated into the Logic Grammar formalism. The result, which we call Inheritance Grammar, is a proper superset of DCG and includes many features of PATR-II. Its taxonomic reasoning facilitates semantic type-class reasoning during grammatical analysis.