A Generalized Approach to Equational Unification

Abstract

Given a set of equational axioms and two terms containing function symbols and variables, the equational unification problem is to find a uniform replacement of terms for the variables that makes the terms provably equal from the axioms. In the variable-only case, the two terms contain only variables and function symbols from the axioms. In the general case, the terms may contain symbols not appearing in the axioms, there may be more than on instance of a set of anxioms, and there may be more than one set of axioms.