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Eliminating Redundancy in Higher-Order Unification: A Lightweight Approach

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Automated Reasoning (IJCAR 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4130))

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Abstract

In this paper, we discuss a lightweight approach to eliminate the overhead due to implicit type arguments during higher-order unification of dependently-typed terms. First, we show that some implicit type information is uniquely determined, and can therefore be safely skipped during higher-order unification. Second, we discuss its impact in practice during type reconstruction and during proof search within the logical framework Twelf. Our experimental results show that implicit type arguments are numerous and large in size, but their impact on run-time is between 10% and 20%. On the other hand optimizations such as eliminating the occurs check are shown to be crucial to achieve significant performance improvements.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Brigitte Pientka

Authors
  1. Brigitte Pientka
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence Research Group, University of Koblenz-Landau, Universitätsstr. 1, 56070, Koblenz

    Ulrich Furbach

  2. SRI International, MS EL256,, 333 Ravenswood Avenue, 94025-3493, Menlo Park, CA, USA

    Natarajan Shankar

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Pientka, B. (2006). Eliminating Redundancy in Higher-Order Unification: A Lightweight Approach. In: Furbach, U., Shankar, N. (eds) Automated Reasoning. IJCAR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4130. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11814771_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11814771_32

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37187-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37188-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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