Unification Grammars

Nissim Francez is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. His research in the last twenty years focused on computational linguistics in general and on the formal semantics of natural language in particular, mainly in the framework of type-logical grammar. His most recent research topic is proof-theoretic semantics for natural language. He is the author of several books and about 150 scientific articles. He regularly serves on editorial boards and program committees for several major conferences, including the committee of the Beth FoLLI (Association for Logic, Language, and Information) Dissertation Award. Shuly Wintner is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Haifa, Israel. His areas of interest include computational linguistics and natural language processing, with a focus on formal grammars, morphology, syntax and Semitic languages. He is the author or editor of nearly 100 publications. He has served on program committees of numerous conferences, as a member of the standing committee overseeing the yearly Formal Grammar conference and as the editor-in-chief of the journal Research in Language and Computation.

'… the book offers a good introduction to unification grammars, which is exceptional in its rigorous mathematical treatment. It may be particularly well suited for use in university courses that not only seek to convey to students some basic knowledge and understanding of unification grammars but moreover attempt to familiarise them with formal descriptions and mathematical proofs.' Mark-Jan Nederhof, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming

• 1. Introduction; 2. Feature structures; 3. Unification; 4. Unification grammars; 5. Linguistic applications; 6. Computational aspects of unification grammars; 7. Conclusion.