Abstract Attempting to treat ambiguities in typed feature formalisms presents a dilemma. Ways out of this dilemma are discussed in this paper. They include reliance on processin g strategies without addition of additional knowledge processing guided by statistical probability leaving desambiguation to external knowledge sources using additional constraints only if they are needed for disambiguation. We propose the addition of preference values to typed ferature structures. Using preference values has the effect that violation of the additional constraints needed for disambiguation only decreases the preference value, but does not make the sentence unacceptable.
Disambiguation is achieved by selecting the reading with the highest preference value.