Inheritance and the CCG Lexicon

I propose a uniform approach to the elimination of redundancy in CCG lexicons, where grammars incorporate inheritance hierarchies of lexical types, defined over a simple, feature-based category description language. The resulting formalism is partially ‘constraint-based’, in that the category notation is interpreted against an underlying set of tree-like feature structures. I argue that this version of CCG subsumes a number of other proposed category notations devised to allow for the construction of more efficient lexicons. The formalism retains desirable properties such as tractability and strong competence, and provides a way of approaching the problem of how to generalise CCG lexicons which have been automatically induced from treebanks.