Russell, G., J. Carroll and S. Warwick-Armstrong (1991) `Multiple default inheritance in a unification-based lexicon'. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Berkeley, CA. 215-221.
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.
Download pdf version.