Anti-unification in Constraint Logic Programming
Anti-unification refers to the process of generalizing two (or more) goals into a single, more general, goal that captures some of the structure that is common to all initial goals. In general one is typically interested in computing what is often called a most specific generalization, that is a gen...
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| Published in: | Theory and practice of logic programming Vol. 19; no. 5-6; pp. 773 - 789 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge, UK
Cambridge University Press
01.09.2019
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| Subjects: | |
| ISSN: | 1471-0684, 1475-3081 |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Anti-unification refers to the process of generalizing two (or more) goals into a single, more general, goal that captures some of the structure that is common to all initial goals. In general one is typically interested in computing what is often called a most specific generalization, that is a generalization that captures a maximal amount of shared structure. In this work we address the problem of anti-unification in CLP, where goals can be seen as unordered sets of atoms and/or constraints. We show that while the concept of a most specific generalization can easily be defined in this context, computing it becomes an NP-complete problem. We subsequently introduce a generalization algorithm that computes a well-defined abstraction whose computation can be bound to a polynomial execution time. Initial experiments show that even a naive implementation of our algorithm produces acceptable generalizations in an efficient way. |
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| Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 14 |
| ISSN: | 1471-0684 1475-3081 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/S1471068419000188 |