Inheritance in Natural Language Processing

In this introduction to the special issues, we begin by outlining a concrete example that indicates some of the motivations leading to the widespread use of inheritance networks in computational linguistics. This example allows us to illustrate some of the formal choices that have to be made by those who seek network solutions to natural language processing (NLP) problems. We provide some pointers into the extensive body of AI knowledge representation publications that have been concerned with the theory of inheritance over the last dozen years or so. We go on to identify the three rather separate traditions that have led to the current work in NLP. We then provide a fairly comprehensive literature survey of the use that computational linguists have made of inheritance networks over the last two decades, organized by reference to levels of linguistic description. In the course of this survey, we draw the reader's attention to each of the papers in these issues of Computational Linguistics and set them in the context of related work.