Making DATR Work for Speech: Lexicon Compilation in SUNDIAL

We present DIALEX, an inheritance-based tool that facilitates the rapid construction of linguistic knowledge bases. Simple lexical entries are added to an application-specific DATR lexicon that inherits morphosyntactic, syntactic, and lexico-semantic constraints from an applicationindependent set of structured base definitions. A lexicon generator expands the DATR lexicon out into a disjunctive normal form lexicon. This is then encoded either as an acceptance lexicon (in which the constraining features are bit-encoded for use in pruning word lattices), or as a full lexicon (which is used for assigning interpretations or for generating messages).