A Polynomial-Time Fragment of Dominance Constraints

Alexander Koller (1) , Kurt Mehlhorn (2) , Joachim Niehren (3)

1 Allgemeine Linguistik - Allgemeine Linguistik Computational Linguistics and phonetics
2 MPII - Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
3 Programming Systems Lab [Saarland]

Dominance constraints are a logical language for describing trees that is widely used in computational linguistics. Their general satisfiability problem is known to be NP-complete. Here we identify emphnormal dominance constraints, a natural fragment whose satisfiability problem we show to be in polynomial time. We present a quadratic satisfiability algorithm and use it in another algorithm that enumerates solutions efficiently. Our result is useful for various applications of dominance constraints and related formalisms.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]; Théorie et langage formel [cs.FL]; Algorithme et structure de données [cs.DS]

Alexander Koller, Kurt Mehlhorn, Joachim Niehren. A Polynomial-Time Fragment of Dominance Constraints. 38th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 2000, Hong Kong, China. pp.368--375. ⟨inria-00536809⟩