Unification with Singleton Tree Grammars

  • Authors:

  • Adrià Gascón;Guillem Godoy;Manfred Schmidt-Schauß

  • Affiliations:

  • LSI Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain 08034;LSI Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain 08034;Dept. Informatik und Mathematik, Inst.f. Informatik, J.W. Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany D-60054

  • Venue:
  • RTA '09 Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

First-order term unification is an essential concept in areas like functional and logic programming, automated deduction, deductive databases, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, compiler design, etc. We build upon recent developments in general grammar-based compression mechanisms for terms, which are more general than dags and investigate algorithms for first-order unification of compressed terms. We prove that the first-order unification of compressed terms is decidable in polynomial time, and also that a compressed representation of the most general unifier can be computed in polynomial time. We use several known results on the used tree grammars, called singleton tree grammars (STG)s, like polynomial time computability of several subalgorithmms: certain grammar extensions, deciding equality of represented terms, and generating the preorder traversal. An innovation is a specialized depth of an STG that shows that unifiers can be represented in polynomial space.