A Complete and Recursive Feature Theory

Rolf Backofen; Gert Smolka

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arXiv · cmp-lg/9406019

A Complete and Recursive Feature Theory

Rolf Backofen·Gert Smolka

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Abstract

Various feature descriptions are being employed in logic programming languages and 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 binary and unary predicates called features and sorts, respectively. We establish a first-order theory FT by means of three axiom schemes, show its completeness, 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.

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Rolf Backofen, Gert Smolka. 1994-06-17. A Complete and Recursive Feature Theory. https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9406019

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