Automatic Inference of DATR Theories

An approach for the automatic acquisition of linguistic knowledge from unstructured data is presented. The acquired knowledge is represented in the lexical knowledge representation language DATR. A set of transformation rules that establish inheritance relationships and a defaultinference algorithm make up the basis components of the system. Since the overall approach is not restricted to a special domain, the heuristic inference strategy uses criteria to evaluate the quality of a DATR theory, where different domains may require different criteria. The system is applied to the linguistic learning task of German noun inflection.