Issues in the Design of a Language for Representing Linguistic Information Based on Inheritance and Feature Structures
Rémi Zajac · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1994
In this chapter, we address some issues in the design of declarative languages based on the notion of inheritance. First, we outline the connections and similarities between the notions of object, frame, conceptual graph and feature structures and we present a synthetic view of these notions. We then present the Typed Feature Structure (TFS) language developed at the University of Stuttgart, which reconciles the object-oriented approach with logic programming. We finally discuss some language design issues. Convergences Developing large NLP software is a very complex and time consuming task. The complexity of NLP can be characterized by the following two main factors: NLP is data-intensive. Any NLP application needs large amounts of complex linguistic information. For example, a realistic application has typically dictionaries with tens of thousands of lexical entries. Sophisticated NLP applications such as database interfaces or machine translation build very complex and intricate data structures for representing linguistic objects associated to strings of words. Part of the complexity also lies in the processing of such objects. Object-oriented Approaches An object-oriented approach to linguistic description addresses these two sources of complexity by providing: facilities to manage the design process: data abstraction and inheritance. facilities for capturing directly the interconnections and constraints in the data: properties, relations and complex objects. These features are common to object-oriented languages (OOL), objectoriented database management systems (OODBMS) or knowledge representation languages (KRL).