Decidability and undecidability in stand-alone feature logics

Authors:
Patrick Blackburn;Edith Spaan
Affiliations:
University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands;SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
Venue:
EACL '93 Proceedings of the sixth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Year:
1993

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Abstract

This paper investigates the complexity of the satisfiability problem for feature logics strong enough to code entire grammars unaided. We show that feature logics capable of both enforcing re-entrancy and stating linguistic generalisations will have undecidable satisfiability problems even when most Boolean expressivity has been discarded. We exhibit a decidable fragment, but the restrictions imposed to ensure decidability render it unfit for stand-alone use. The import of these results is discussed, and we conclude that there is a need for feature logics that are less homogeneous in their treatment of linguistic structure.