Dominance Constraints in Context Unification

Author: Joachim Niehren and Alexander Koller

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Tree descriptions based on dominance constraints are popular in several areas of computational linguistics including syntax, semantics, and discourse. Tree descriptions in the language of context unification have attracted some interest in unification and rewriting theory. Recently, dominance constraints and context unification have both been used in different underspecified approaches to the semantics of scope, parallelism, and their interaction. This raises the question whether both description languages are related. In this paper, we show for a first time that dominance constraints can be expressed in context unification. We also prove that dominance constraints extended with parallelism constraints are equal in expressive power to context unification.