Partial Evaluation for Efficient Access to Inheritance Lexicons

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Multiple default inheritance formalisms for lexicons have attracted much interest in recent years. I propose a new efficient method to access such lexicons. After showing two basic strategies for lookup in inheritance lexicons, a compromise is developed which combines to a large degree (from a practical point of view) the advantages of both strategies and avoids their disadvantages. The method is a kind of (off-line) partial evaluation that makes a subset of inherited information explicit before using the lexicon. I identify the parts of a lexicon which should be evaluated, and show how partial evaluation works for inheritance lexicons. Finally, the theoretical results are confirmed by a complete implementation. Speedups by a factor of 10-100 are reached.