Inheritance, Defaults and the Lexicon

Inheritance has been used in AI knowledge representation for many years. Until recently, however, it had not been much exploited in linguistic representation. This collection describes how the lexicon may be structured using inheritance. The papers are mostly formal in orientation, mainly concentrating on unification-based systems (which nowadays form the basis for most theoretically motivated work on NLP, and for current linguistic theories such as HPSG) and discuss syntax and morphology as well as lexical semantics. The formalization of default inheritance, in particular, is discussed in detail, and linked with the AI literature.

The lexicon is now a major focus of research in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). This collection describes techniques of lexical representation within a unification-based framework and their linguistic application, concentrating on the issue of structuring the lexicon using inheritance and defaults.