Dominance constraints are a language of tree descriptions. Tree descriptions are widely used in computational linguistics for talking
and reasoning about trees. While previous research has focused on the
conjunctive fragment, we now extend the account to all Boolean
connectives and propose a new formalism that combines dominance
constraints with a feature tree logic.
Although the satisfiability problem in the conjunctive fragment is
known to be NP-complete, we have previously demonstrated that it can
be addressed very effectively by constraint propagation: we developed
an encoding that transforms a dominance constraint into a constraint
satisfaction problem on finite sets solvable by constraint
programming. We present a generalization of this encoding for our
more expressive formalism, and prove soundness and completeness. Our
main contribution is a treatment of disjunction suitable for
constraint propagation.