Abstract: For those of us who belonged to the Bay Area (Computational) Linguistics Community, the early eighties were a heady time. Local researchers working on linguistics, computational linguistics, and logic programming were investigating notions of category, type, feature, term, and partial specification that appeared to converge to a powerful new approach for describing (linguistic) objects and their relationships by monotonic accumulation of constraints between their features. The seed notions had almost independently arisen in generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG) (Gazdar et al. 1985), lexical-functional grammar (LFG) (Bresnan and Kaplan 1982), functionalunification grammar (FUG) (Kay 1985), logic programming (Colmerauer 1978, Pereira and Warren 1980), and terminological reasoning systems (Ait-Kaci 1984). It took, however, a lot of experimental and theoretical work to identify precisely what the core notions were, how particular systems related to the core notions, and what were the most illuminating mathematical accounts of that core. The development of the unificationbased formalism PATR-II (Shieber 1984) was an early step toward the definition of the core, but its mathematical analysis, and the clarification of the connections between the various systems, are only now coming to a reasonable closure. The Logic of Typed Feature Structures is the first monograph that brings all the main theoretical ideas into one place where they can be related and compared in a unified setting. Carpenter's book touches most of the crucial questions of the developments during the decade, provides proofs for central results, and reaches right up to the edge of current research in the field. These contributions alone make it an indispensable compendium for the researcher or graduate student working on constraint-based grammatical formalisms, and they also make it a very useful reference work for researchers in object-oriented databases and logic programming. Having discharged the main obligation of the reviewer of saying who should read the book under review and why, I will now survey each of the book's four parts while raising some more general questions impinging on the whole book as they arise from the discussion of each part.
Publication Year: 1992
Publication Date: 1992-09-01
Language: en
Type: book
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Cited By Count: 613
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