The Unification Hierarchy is Undecidable

In unification theory, equational theories can be classified according to the existence and cardinality of minimal complete solution sets for equation systems. For unitary, finitary, and infinitary theories minimal complete solution sets always exist and are singletons, finite, or possibly infinite sets, respectively. In nullary theories, minimal complete sets do not exist for some equation systems. These classes form the unification hierarchy. We show that it is not possible to decide where a given equational theory resides in the unification hierarchy. Moreover, it is proved that for some classes this problem is not even recursively enumerable

Opening the AC-Unification Race

This note reports about the implementation of AC-unification algorithms, based on the variable-abstraction method of Stickel and on the constant-abstraction method of Livesey, Siekmann, and Herold. We give a set of 105 benchmark examples and compare execution times for implementations of the two approaches. This documents for other researchers what we consider to be the state-of-the-art performance for elementary AC-unification problems

Complete Sets of Reductions Modulo A Class of Equational Theories which Generate Infinite Congruence Classes

In this paper we present a generalization of the Knuth-Bendix procedure for generating a complete set of reductions modulo an equational theory. Previous such completion procedures have been restricted to equational theories which generate finite congruence classes. The distinguishing feature of this work is that we are able to generate complete sets of reductions for some equational theories which generate infinite congruence classes. In particular, we are able to handle the class of equational theories which contain the associative, commutative, and identity laws for one or more operators. We first generalize the notion of rewriting modulo an equational theory to include a special form of conditional reduction. We are able to show that this conditional rewriting relation restores the finite termination property which is often lost when rewriting in the presence of infinite congruence classes. We then develop Church-Rosser tests based on the conditional rewriting relation and set forth a completion procedure incorporating these tests. Finally, we describe a computer program which implements the theory and give the results of several experiments using the program

Unification in monoidal theories is solving linear equations over semirings

Although for numerous equational theories unification algorithms have been developed there is still a lack of general methods. In this paper we apply algebraic techniques to the study of a whole class of theories, which we call monoidal. Our approach leads to general results on the structure of unification algorithms and the unification type of such theories. An equational theory is monoidal if it contains a binary operation which is associative and commutative, an identity for the binary operation, and an arbitrary number of unary symbols which are homomorphisms for the binary operation and the identity. Monoidal theories axiomatize varieties of abelian monoids. Examples are the theories of abelian monoids (AC), idempotent abelian monoids (ACI), and abelian groups. To every monoidal theory we associate a semiring. Intuitively, semirings are rings without subtraction. We show that every unification problem in a monoidal theory can be translated into a system of linear equations over the corresponding semiring. More specifically, problems without free constants are translated into homogeneous equations. For problems with free constants inhomogeneous equations have to be solved in addition. Exploiting the correspondence between unification and linear algebra we give algebraic characterizations of the unification type of a theory. In particular, we show that with respect to unification without constants monoidal theories are either unitary or nullary. Applying Hilbert\u27s Basis Theorem we prove that theories of groups with commuting homomorphisms are unitary with respect to unification with and without constants

Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Unification

Proceedings of the 19th international workshop on Unification, held during RDP'2005 in Nara, Japan, on April 22, 2005.UNIF is the main international meeting on unification. Unification is concerned with the problem of identifying given terms, either syntactically or modulo a given logical theory. Syntactic unification is the basic operation of most automated reasoning systems, and unification modulo theories can be used, for instance, to build in special equational theories into theorem provers

Complete Sets of Transformations for General \u3cem\u3eE\u3c/em\u3e-Unification

This paper is concerned with E-unification in arbitrary equational theories. We extend the method of transformations on systems of terms, developed by Martelli-Montanari for standard unification, to E-unification by giving two sets of transformations, BT and T, which are proved to be sound and complete in the sense that a complete set of E-unifiers for any equational theory E can be enumerated by either of these sets. The set T is an improvement of BT, in that many E-unifiers produced by BT will be weeded out by T. In addition, we show that a generalization of surreduction (also called narrowing) combined with the computation of critical pairs is complete. A new representation of equational proofs as certain kinds of trees is used to prove the completeness of the set BT in a rather direct fashion that parallels the completeness of the transformations in the case of (standard) unification. The completeness of T and the generalization of surreduction is proved by a method inspired by the concept of unfailing completion, using an abstract (and simpler) notion of the completion of a set of equations

Unification in Commutative Theories, Hilbert's Basis Theorem, and Gröbner Bases

Unification in a commutative theory E may be reduced to solving linear equations in the corresponding semiring S(E) (Nutt (1988)). The unification type of E can thus be characterized by algebraic properties of S(E). The theory of abelian groups with n commuting homomorphisms corresponds to the semiring Z[X1,...,Xn]. Thus Hilbert’s Basis Theorem can be used to show that this theory is unitary. But this argument does not yield a unification algorithm. Linear equations in Z[X1,..,Xn] can be solved with the help of Gröbner Base methods, which thus provide the desired algorithm. The theory of abelian monoids with a homomorphism is of type zero (Baader (1988)). This can also be proved by using the fact that the corresponding semiring, namely N[X], is not noetherian. An other example of a semiring (even ring), which is not noetherian, is the ring Z, where X1, ..., Xn ( n > 1 ) are non-commuting indeterminates. This semiring corresponds to the theory of abelian groups with n non-commuting homomorphisms. Surprisingly, by construction of a Gröbner Base algorithm for right ideals in Z, it can be shown that this theory is unitary unifying

Inheritance hierarchies: Semantics and unification

Inheritance hierarchies are introduced as a means of representing taxonomicallyorganized data. The hierarchies are built up from so-called feature types that are ordered by subtyping and whose elements are records. Every feature type comes with a set of features prescribing fields of its record elements. So-called feature terms are available to denote subsets of feature types. Feature unification is introduced as an operation that decides whether two feature terms have a nonempty intersection and computes a feature term denoting the intersection.We model our inheritance hierarchies as algebraic specifications in ordersortedequational logic using initial algebra semantics. Our framework integrates feature types whose elements are obtained as records with constructor types whose elements are obtained by constructor application. Unification in these hierarchies combines record unification with order-sorted term unification and is presented as constraint solving. We specify a unitary unification algorithm by a set of simplification rules and prove its soundness and completeness with respect to the model-theoretic semantics

Some basic notions of first-order unification theory

This report does not contain much novel material, but collects the basic notions and the most frequently used lemmata and theorems of first order unification theory. It is restricted to the case of free terms (i.e. no defining equations)