TY  - UNPD
A1  - Schmidt-Schauß, Manfred
T1  - Decidability of bounded second order unification
T2  - Technical report Frank / Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Fachbereich Informatik und Mathematik, Institut für Informatik ; 11
N2  - It is well known that first order uni cation is decidable, whereas second order and higher order unification is undecidable. Bounded second order unification (BSOU) is second order unification under the restriction that only a bounded number of holes in the instantiating terms for second order variables is permitted, however, the size of the instantiation is not restricted. In this paper, a decision algorithm for bounded second order unification is described. This is the fist non-trivial decidability result for second order unification, where the (finite) signature is not restricted and there are no restrictions on the occurrences of variables. We show that the monadic second order unification (MSOU), a specialization of BSOU is in sum p s. Since MSOU is related to word unification, this is compares favourably to the best known upper bound NEXPTIME (and also to the announced upper bound PSPACE) for word unification. This supports the claim that bounded second order unification is easier than context unification, whose decidability is currently an open question.
T3  - Technical report Frank / Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Fachbereich Informatik und Mathematik, Institut für Informatik - 11 
KW  - unification
KW  - second order unification
KW  - context unification
KW  - automated deduction
KW  - rewriting
KW  - logics in artificial intelligence
Y1  - 1997
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/4584
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-8997
UR  - http://www.ki.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/papers/schauss/bouncsl.ps
PB  - Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Univ., Fachbereich Informatik und Mathematik, Inst. für Informatik, Research group for Artificial Intelligence and Software Technology
CY  - Frankfurt [am Main]
ER  -