[developers] Feature unification API library

[W.P. McNeill (UW)]

I've talked to a couple of you about this at the Barcelona summit but I
wanted to send a broader email.
One thing I'd love to have is a fast, efficient, library-based
implementation of feature structure unification.  Something written in C and
separate from the cheap code so that it could be called by other
programs/scripting languages, NLTK etc.

I'm picturing a user-provided function for value unification whose prototype
looks something like this:

bool value_unify(char *value1, char* value2)


so that the whole issue of what kind of grammar you have is kept separate.

Has anyone ever tried to create a library like this?  If not, where is the
unification source code in cheap so that I can get an idea of how it works?

I have absolutely no time to look at this in the near future, but I've been
curious about it for a while so it would be good information to know and
have archived.

-- 
W.P. McNeill
http://staff.washington.edu/billmcn/index.shtml
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.delph-in.net/archives/developers/attachments/20090723/8b0ad7f1/attachment.html>