On the use of advanced logic programming languages in computational linguistics

AbstractComputational Linguistics and Logic Programming have strong connections, but the former uses concepts that are absent from the most familiar implementations of the latter. We advocate that a Logic Programming language need not feature the Computational Linguistics concepts exactly, it must only provide a logical way of dealing with them. We focus on the manipulation of higher-order terms and the logical handling of context, and we show that the advanced features of Prolog II and λProlog are useful for dealing with these concepts. Higher-order terms are native in λProlog, and Prolog II's infinite trees provide a handy data-structure for manipulating them. The formula language of λProlog can be transposed in the Logic Grammar realm to allow for a logical handling of context