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Unification as a Grammatical Tool*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Lauri Carlson and
Krister Linden
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.
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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.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , December 1987, pp. 111 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

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