6th International Workshop on Unification

Goals of this Dagstuhl Seminar

This workshop was the sixth in a series of three-days meetings on unification and related topics, the previous ones having been in Val d'Ajol (France), Lambrecht (Germany), Leeds (UK), and Barbizon (France). As its predecessors, UNIF'92 was meant to be an opportunity to meet old and new colleagues, to present recent (even unfinished) work, and to discuss new ideas and trends in unification and related fields. In addition, these workshops are a good opportunity for young researchers and researchers working in related areas to get an overview of the current state of the art in unification theory.

The very positive response to our invitation has shown that unification theory still is a rather active research area. We had 52 participants from 8 countries, of which France and Germany provided the largest contingents. A travel grant by NSF made it possible t.o have a larger than usual participation from the US.

The program consisted of 10 sessions with short talks (15 or 25 minutes), followed by discussions, a lively panel discussion on past and future developments in unification theory, and system demonstrations.

The sessions were organized around the following topics:

• Type Reconstruction
• AC and AC1 Unification
• General E-unification and Narrowing
• Higher-Order Unification
• Generalizations of Unification
• Constraint Solving
• Feature and Order-Sorted Unification
• Combination Problems
• Unification in Specific Theories
• Complexity
• Applications

Dagstuhl castle and its staff provided a very convenient and stimulating environment, which greatly contributed to the success of the workshop.