Anti-unification and Generalization: A Survey
This foundational work benefits AI and related communities by organizing and clarifying AU research, potentially reducing redundant efforts in application-specific developments.
The paper addresses the lack of systematic study and surveys on anti-unification (AU), a fundamental operation for generalization in inductive inference, by providing the first comprehensive survey and a general framework to categorize existing and future research.
Anti-unification (AU) is a fundamental operation for generalization computation used for inductive inference. It is the dual operation to unification, an operation at the foundation of automated theorem proving. Interest in AU from the AI and related communities is growing, but without a systematic study of the concept nor surveys of existing work, investigations often resort to developing application-specific methods that existing approaches may cover. We provide the first survey of AU research and its applications and a general framework for categorizing existing and future developments.