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Anti-unification in Constraint Logic Programming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2019

GONZAGUE YERNAUX Open the ORCID record for GONZAGUE YERNAUX [Opens in a new window]  and
WIM VANHOOF
GONZAGUE YERNAUX
Affiliation:
University of Namur, BelgiumNamur Digital Institute (e-mail: gonzague.yernaux@unamur.be)
WIM VANHOOF
Affiliation:
University of Namur, BelgiumNamur Digital Institute (e-mail: gonzague.yernaux@unamur.be)
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

Anti-unification(most specific) generalizationCLPprogram analysis

Information

Type
Original Article
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 19 , Special Issue 5-6: 35th International Conference on Logic Programming , September 2019 , pp. 773 - 789
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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