Balancing Clarity and Efficiency in Typed Feature Logic Through Delaying

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the balance between clarity and efficiency in HPSG design, with particular reference to the design decisions made in the English Resource Grammar (LinGO, 1999, ERG). It is argued that a simple generalization of the conventional delay statements used in logic programming is sufficient to restore much of the functionality and concomitant benefit that the ERG elected to forego, with an acceptable although still perceptible computational cost. 1 Motivation By convention, current HPSGs consist, at the very least, of a deductive backbone of extended phrase structure rules, in which each category is a description of a typed feature structure (TFS), augmented with constraints that enforce the principles of grammar. These principles typically take the form of statements, "for all TFSs, holds," where is usually an implication. Historically, HPSG used a much richer set of formal descriptive devices, however, mostly on analogy to developments...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Gerald Penn
• Keywords: ACL 2004, ACL 2007, Conventional Delay Statements, Formal Descriptive Devices, HPSG Design