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<Paper uid="C94-2204">
  <Title>TYPED FEATU19E STRUCTURES AS DESCRIPTIONS</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Describing objects is one of several purposes for which linguists use fe.at, ul:e structures. A description is an er, tity that can be interpreted as true or false of an object. For example, the conventional interpretation of the description 'it is black' is true of a soot particle, but false of ~ snowtlake, q'herefore, any use of a feature structure to describe an object delnands that the feature structure can be interpreted as true or false of the object. In this paper, I tailor the semantics of \[K~NG 1 989\] to suit the typed feature structures of \[CAII.I'F, NTFA{ 1 992\], and so create an explicit interpretation of a typed feature structure used as a descript, ion. I then use this interpretation to define the notion of a satisfiable feature structure.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Though no featm'e structure algebra provides descriptions as expressive as those provided by a feature logic, using feature structures to describe objects profits from a large stock of available computational techniques to represent, test and process feature structures. In this paper, I demonstrate the computational benefits of marrying a tractable syntax and an explicit semantics by creating a simple and effective algorithm to decide the satisfiability *The research presented in this paper was sl)onsored by '\]'eilprojekt B4 &amp;quot;Constraints on (h'ammar for Efficient Generation&amp;quot; cff the Sonderforschungsbereich 340 of the Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschafL I also wish to thank Bob Carpenter, Dale (lerdemmm, q'hile) GStz and Jennifer King for their invalualAe hel l) with this paper.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> tWilhehnst.r. 113, 72t17,1 ~l~{ilfingen, (\]el'Ill\[|fly. Einaih klng(r)sfs.nphil.unl- t uebingen.de.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> of a feature structure. Gerdemann and Ggtz's 'Doll type resolution system implements both the sen,antics and an efficient refinement of the satisfiability algorithm I present here (see \[C,5TZ 1993\], \[GEItDF, MANN AND I(ING 1994\] and \[G~m)EMA~N (VC)\]).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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