Related papers: Structure Theorem and Strict Alternation Hierarchy…
Nested words are a structured model of execution paths in procedural programs, reflecting their call and return nesting structure. Finite nested words also capture the structure of parse trees and other tree-structured data, such as XML. We…
Automatic structures are first-order structures whose universe and relations can be represented as regular languages. It follows from the standard closure properties of regular languages that the first-order theory of an automatic structure…
We study Two-Variable First-Order Logic, FO2, under semantic constraints that model hierarchically structured data. Our first logic extends FO2 with a linear order < and a chain of increasingly coarser equivalence relations E_1, E_2, ... .…
We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…
Various feature descriptions are being employed in logic programming languages and constrained-based grammar formalisms. The common notational primitive of these descriptions are functional attributes called features. The descriptions…
We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly…
We consider the two-variable fragment FO^2[<] of first-order logic over finite words. Numerous characterizations of this class are known. Th\'erien and Wilke have shown that it is decidable whether a given regular language is definable in…
We show that the first-order theory of structural subtyping of non-recursive types is decidable. Let $\Sigma$ be a language consisting of function symbols (representing type constructors) and $C$ a decidable structure in the relational…
Program semantics can often be expressed as a (many-sorted) first-order theory S, and program properties as sentences $\varphi$ which are intended to hold in the canonical model of such a theory, which is often incomputable. Recently, we…
It is shown that order-invariance of two-variable first-logic is decidable in the finite. This is an immediate consequence of a decision procedure obtained for the finite satisfiability problem for existential second-order logic with two…
In many instances in first order logic or computable algebra, classical theorems show that many problems are undecidable for general structures, but become decidable if some rigidity is imposed on the structure. For example, the set of…
We study extensions of expressive decidable fragments of first-order logic with circumscription, in particular the two-variable fragment FO$^2$, its extension C$^2$ with counting quantifiers, and the guarded fragment GF. We prove that if…
We study a natural hierarchy in first-order logic, namely the quantifier structure hierarchy, which gives a systematic classification of first-order formulas based on structural quantifier resource. We define a variant of…
We study the expressive power and succinctness of order-invariant sentences of first-order (FO) and monadic second-order (MSO) logic on structures of bounded tree-depth. Order- invariance is undecidable in general and, thus, one strives for…
The regular languages with a neutral letter expressible in first-order logic with one alternation are characterized. Specifically, it is shown that if an arbitrary $\Sigma_2$ formula defines a regular language with a neutral letter, then…
The uniform one-dimensional fragment of first-order logic was introduced a few years ago as a generalization of the two-variable fragment to contexts involving relations of arity greater than two. Quantifiers in this logic are used in…
Recently, symbolic structures were proposed as finite representations of potentially infinite first-order structures, where Linear Integer Arithmetic terms and formulas define the domain and interpretations of a structure. We generalize…
We show that the decidability of the first-order theory of the language that combines Boolean algebras of sets of uninterpreted elements with Presburger arithmetic operations. We thereby disprove a recent conjecture that this theory is…
A condition, in two variants, is given such that if a property P satisfies this condition, then every logic which is at least as strong as first-order logic and can express P fails to have the compactness property. The result is used to…
Spatial conjunction is a powerful construct for reasoning about dynamically allocated data structures, as well as concurrent, distributed and mobile computation. While researchers have identified many uses of spatial conjunction, its…