Automatically Generating Universal Attachments Through Compilation

Universal attachment is a general-purpose mechanism for integrating diverse representation structures and their associated inference programs into a framework built on logical representations and theorem proving. The integration is achieved by links, referred to as universal attachments, that connect logical expressions to these structures and programs. In this paper, we describe a compilation-based method for automatically generating new programs and new universal attachments to those programs given a base set of existing programs and universal attachments. The generation method provides the means to obtain large collections of attachments and attached programs without the traditional specification overhead. As well, the method simplifies the task of validating that a collection of attachments is correct.