  Multiple default inheritance formalisms for lexicons have attracted much
interest in recent years. I propose a new efficient method to access such
lexicons. After showing two basic strategies for lookup in inheritance
lexicons, a compromise is developed which combines to a large degree (from a
practical point of view) the advantages of both strategies and avoids their
disadvantages. The method is a kind of (off-line) partial evaluation that makes
a subset of inherited information explicit before using the lexicon. I identify
the parts of a lexicon which should be evaluated, and show how partial
evaluation works for inheritance lexicons. Finally, the theoretical results are
confirmed by a complete implementation. Speedups by a factor of 10-100 are
reached.
