MPI-I-93-233

Narrowing is a universal unification procedure for equational theories defined by a canonical term rewriting system. In its original form it is extremely inefficient. Therefore, many optimizations have been proposed during the last years. In this paper, we present the narrowing strategies for arbitrary canonical systems in a uniform framework and introduce the new narrowing strategy LSE narrowing. LSE narrowing is complete and improves all other strategies which are complete for arbitrary canonical systems. It is optimal in the sense that two different LSE narrowing derivations cannot generate the same narrowing substitution. Moreover, LSE narrowing computes only normalized narrowing substitutions.