Publikation
A Complete and Recursive Feature Theory
Rolf Backofen; Gert Smolka
Research Report, DFKI GmbH, DFKI Research Reports (RR), Vol. 92-30, 1992.
Zusammenfassung
Various feature descriptions are being employed in constrained-based grammar formalisms. The common notational primitive of these descriptions are functional attributes called features. The descriptions considered in this paper are the possibly quantified first-order formulae obtained from a signature of features and sorts. We establish a complete firstorder theory FT by means of three axiom schemes and construct three elementarily equivalent models. One of the models consists of so-called feature graphs, a data structure common in computational
linguistics. The other two models consist of so-called feature trees, a record-like data structure generalizing the trees corresponding to first-order terms. Our completeness proof exhibits a terminating simplification system deciding validity and satisfiability of possibly quantified feature descriptions.