---
title: "Logic and Feature Structures"
authors:
  - "Mark Johnson"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/146"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1991/0146.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1991
pages: "992-995"
track: "Natural Language"
keywords:
---

# Logic and Feature Structures

Mark Johnson

*Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 992-995.

## Abstract

Feature structures play an important role in linguistic knowledge representation in computational linguistics. Given the proliferation of different feature structure formalisms it is useful to have a "common language" to express them in. This paper shows how a variety of feature structures and constraints on them can be expressed in predicate logic (except for the use of circumscription for non-monotonic devices), including sorted feature values, subsumption constraints and the non-monotonic ANY values and "constraint equations". Many feature systems can be completely axiomatized in the Schonfinkel-Bernays class of first-order formulae, so the decidability of the satisfiability and validity problems for these systems follows immediately.