ARG-ST as a head feature

[Vlado Keselj]

I am using the discussion below to ask if someone has seen any work
regarding the following idea:

My idea is probably only superficially similar to J P Blevins's idea of
using a public/private access control in HPSG.  We can have small HPSG
grammars, called modules (similar to CFG modules by Shuly Wintner).  Some
types in type hierarchy, some features, and some rules (if not included in
types) are public, while the rest of them are private.  Two modules are
merged in a new module by having all public names in one "name space,"
while the private parts are kept separate.  Merging rules and type
hierarchies is especially interesting.

For example, some interesting modules for separate development and merging
at run time are: general syntactic module, general semantic module,
question (interrogative) syntactic module, question semantic module,
domain semantic modules, etc.

Vlado
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vlado Keselj              e-mail: vkeselj at cs.uwaterloo.ca
University of Waterloo    URL   : http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~vkeselj/
Computer Science Graduate Student (PhD)

On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, Martin Jansche wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, J P Blevins wrote:
>
> > However, there are of course other strategies for access control.
> > One simple model, with obvious application to inheritance-based
> > grammar formalisms, is the private/protected/public distinction
> > within object-oriented derivatives of C.  A straightforward
> > application to feature structures would classify particular
> > features, such as the CONTENT features mentioned by Carl, as
> > syntactically inaccessible (i.e., private). Another class, which
> > would include the traditional HEAD features, would be classified
> > as accessible to the head daughter (i.e., the analogue of
> > protected).
>
> This analogy is flawed, due to a confusion of inheritance (code
> sharing and subtyping in certain programming languages, not just
> extensions of C) and "feature percolation" or structure sharing in the
> HPSG framework.  If you want a public/private distinction, it would
> amount to defining the subtype/-sort relation in such a way that the
> features appropriate for a subtype include only the public features of
> its supertypes plus all features the type itself introduces.  I'm not
> sure what this would accomplish, since the rationale for this kind of
> access control in programming languages is quite different from what
> you seem to have in mind.
>
> - martin jansche
>