Multiple default inheritance in a unification-based lexicon

Abstract

A formalism is presented for lexical specification in unification-based grammars which exploits defeasible multiple inheritance to express regularity, sub-regularity, and exceptions in classifying the properties of words. Such systems are in the general case intractable; the present proposal represents an attempt to reduce complexity while retaining sufficient expressive power for the task at hand. Illustrative examples are given of morphological analyses from English and German.