default inheritance

[Nina Wacholder]

In research for my dissertation (Acquiring Syntactic Generalizations from
Positive Evidence: An HPSG Model, CUNY Graduate Center, 1995), I found
that the most substantive objections to default inheritance were
based on computational complexity.  GPSG
used
context-sensitive syntactic defaults
that required trans-derivational comparison of trees before default values
could be instantiated.  This bad experience in GPSG led to the abandonment
of defaults in HPSG.  In the learning model proposed in my
dissertation, defaults are lexical and strictly local; the intractability
problems associated with syntactic defaults are thereby avoided.

Nina Wacholder



Dr. Nina Wacholder
Assistant Professor
Department of Library and Information Science
Rutgers University School for Communication, Information
          and Library Studies (SCILS)
4 Huntington Street, Room 304	
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

email: nina at scils.rutgers.edu
Phone: 732-932-7500 ext. 8214
Fax: 732-932-6916