ProFIT: Prolog with Features, Inheritance and Templates

Abstract

ProFIT is an extension of Standard Prolog with Features, Inheritance and Templates. ProFIT allows the programmer or grammar developer to declare an inheritance hierarchy, features and templates. Sorted feature terms can be used in ProFIT programs together with Prolog terms to provide a clearer description language for linguistic structures. ProFIT compiles all sorted feature terms into a Prolog term representation, so that the built-in Prolog term unification can be used for the unification of sorted feature structures, and no special unification algorithm is needed. ProFIT programs are compiled into Prolog programs, so that no meta-interpreter is needed for their execution. ProFIT thus provides a direct step from grammars developed with sorted feature terms to Prolog programs usable for practical NLP systems.