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“Generating” Design Spaces
Published in Constantine Stephanidis, User Interfaces for All, 2000
Margherita Antona, Demosthenes Akoumianakis, Constantine Stephanidis
The inherent complexity and ambiguity of natural language, as well as the emergence of new applications such as natural-language generation (NLG), has driven research in both linguistic theory and NLP toward the development of approaches that allow capturing linguistic phenomena in concise, easily maintainable, computationally effective, and processing algorithm-independent ways. This trend emerged with the appearance of unification-based representation formalisms for the representation of linguistic knowledge (Shieber, 1986), and developed into a family of language theories (and underlying formalisms) based on such a notion of unification. Unification-based grammars are characterized by the declarative representation of linguistic objects, such as words, phrases, and sentences, by means of (recursive) feature structures (i.e., attribute-value pairs), which may be only partially instantiated (i.e., some values may be variables). A basic operation over feature structures, called unification, is used for checking their consistency and merging them. In essence, unification combines (partial) feature structure descriptions of a linguistic object into a unique (more informative) description that includes all the attributes and values of the unified descriptions, provided that they are consistent, that is, no attribute is explicitly assigned different values in those descriptions. Such an approach is also called constraint-based, because it emphasizes the notion that a grammar constitutes a set of constraints that the admissible signs of a language should satisfy.
Constraint Programming
Published in Jay Liebowitz, The Handbook of Applied Expert Systems, 2019
It was recognized that constraint solving lies at the heart of logic programming, in its built-in unification. Researchers began to replace (syntactic) unification with other equation solvers. An important example of this was Boolean unification: this is a solver for equations between Boolean expressions, whose possible values are only true or false. This development has now found a commercially successful application for design and verification of digital circuits. Moreover, Boolean unification is also being applied to the design and verification of real-time control software.
FUZZY REASONING BASED ON CONCEPT OF SIMILARITY
Published in Kumar S. Ray, Soft Computing and Its Applications, Volume Two, 2014
In this section, classical unification is modified to a “relaxed” unification when, the classical process fails. In the declarative paradigm of Logic Programming the unification plays a central role. Moreover, such a technique could be usefully exploited in the context of deductive databases. We will consider languages where no function symbol occurs.
Uncovering illicit supply networks and their interfaces to licit counterparts through graph-theoretic algorithms
Published in IISE Transactions, 2023
Rashid Anzoom, Rakesh Nagi, Chrysafis Vogiatzis
A Bill-of-Materials (BOM) provides a catalog of all the components and parts required to produce a single unit of a finished product with particular attention to the hierarchical relationships between different components (Jiao et al., 2000). Multiple BOMs may exist for a single product, given the availability of alternate materials and/or manufacturing processes. Each associated BOM represents a variant design of the original product and thus bears high similarity with others. A well-established approach for generalizing these variant BOMs is to merge them into a Generic Bill-of-Materials (GBOM) (Hegge and Wortmann, 1991), a parameter-constrained structure where certain parameter specifications lead to distinct variant BOMs (Romanowski and Nagi, 2004; Zhu et al., 2007). However, it does not allow for the simultaneous representation of multiple variant BOMs, barring instant visibility of all parts/materials that may flow across the supply chain. We thus require a unification methodology that facilitates such a representation. Logical graphs (e.g., AND-OR, AND-XOR) are good candidates for this purpose (Wedekind and Muller, 1981). Another relevant tool is the Equivalence Class Feature Diagram, which has applications in graph-based variability modeling (Carbonnel et al., 2019). It extends the traditional feature set (AND, OR, XOR) with additional representation capabilities (e.g., mutual exclusivity). In this research, we draw inspiration from these techniques to define a unification methodology for the alternate BOMs. We additionally note that past work in GBOM Romanowski and Nagi, 2004; Romanowski et al. 2006) was conducted from a product design perspective, and there is very little work that attempts to take this formulation forward to the supply chain dimension. Thus, we use the unified BOM to define a generalized version of the supply chain that incorporates all possible network configurations.