Applying Constraint Handling Rules to HPSG

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) have provided a realistic solution to an over-arching problem in many fields that deal with constraint logic programming: how to combine recursive functions or relations with constraints while avoiding non-termination problems. This paper focuses on some other benefits that CHR, specifically their implementation in SICStus Prolog, have provided to computational linguists working on grammar design tools. CHR rules are applied by means of a subsumption check and this check is made only when their variables are instantiated or bound. The former functionality is at best difficult to simulate using more primitive coroutining statements such as SICStus when/2, and the latter simply did not exist in any form before CHR. For the sake of providing a case study in how these can be applied to grammar development, we consider the Attribute Logic Engine (ALE), a Prolog preprocessor for logic programming with typed feature structures, and its extension to a complete grammar development system for Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a popular constraint-based linguistic theory that uses typed feature structures. In this context, CHR can be used not only to extend the constraint language of feature structure descriptions to include relations in a declarative way, but also to provide support for constraints with complex antecedents and constraints on the co-occurrence of feature values that are necessary to interpret the type system of HPSG properly.