Anti-Unification and Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Anti-unification is a well-known method to compute generalizations in logic. Given two objects, the goal of anti-unification is to reflect commonalities between these objects in the computed generalizations, and highlight differences between them.Anti-unification appears to be useful for various tasks in natural language processing. Semantic classification of sentences based on their syntactic parse trees, grounded language learning, semantic text similarity, insight grammar learning, metaphor modeling: This is an incomplete list of topics where generalization computation has been used in one form or another. The major anti-unification technique in these applications is the original method for first-order terms over fixed arity alphabets, introduced by Plotkin and Reynolds in 1970s, and some of its adaptations.The goal of this paper is to give a brief overview about existing linguistic applications of anti-unification, discuss a couple of powerful and flexible generalization computation algorithms developed recently, and argue about their potential use in natural language processing tasks.