Related papers: Existential Second Order Logic Expression With Hor…

A policy describes the conditions under which an action is permitted or forbidden. We show that a fragment of (multi-sorted) first-order logic can be used to represent and reason about policies. Because we use first-order logic, policies…

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…

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 consider first-order logic over the subword ordering on finite words, where each word is available as a constant. Our first result is that the $\Sigma_1$ theory is undecidable (already over two letters). We investigate the decidability…

We consider the two-variable fragment of first-order logic with one distinguished binary predicate constrained to be interpreted as a transitive relation. The finite satisfiability problem for this logic is shown to be decidable, in triply…

We study the expressive power of successor-invariant first-order logic, which is an extension of first-order logic where the usage of an additional successor relation on the structure is allowed, as long as the validity of formulas is…

In this paper, we study the sampling problem for first-order logic proposed recently by Wang et al. -- how to efficiently sample a model of a given first-order sentence on a finite domain? We extend their result for the…

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…

We introduce a restricted second-order logic $\mathrm{SO}^{\mathit{plog}}$ for finite structures where second-order quantification ranges over relations of size at most poly-logarithmic in the size of the structure. We demonstrate the…

In Descriptive Complexity, there is a vast amount of literature on decision problems, and their classes such as \textbf{P, NP, L and NL}. ~ However, research on the descriptive complexity of optimisation problems has been limited.…

The \emph{Entscheidungsproblem}, or the classical decision problem, asks whether a given formula of first-order logic is satisfiable. In this work, we consider an extension of this problem to regular first-order \emph{theories}, i.e.,…

We define and investigate HC-forcing invariant formulas of set theory, whose interpretations in the hereditarily countable sets are well behaved under forcing extensions. This leads naturally to a notion of cardinality ||Phi|| for sentences…

We provide a formula for the lower bound in the form of $|F| \ge K$, in such a way that the decision version of unweighted non-bipartite matching can be solved in polynomial time. ~The parameter $K$ can vary from instance to instance. We…

Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of $k$-sized subsets of $[n]$ that does not contain $s$ pairwise disjoint subsets. The Erd\H{o}s Matching Conjecture, a celebrated and long-standing open problem in extremal combinatorics, asserts the maximum…

We recently described a formalism for reasoning with if-then rules that re expressed with different levels of firmness [18]. The formalism interprets these rules as extreme conditional probability statements, specifying orders of magnitude…

The relevance of polynomial formula classes to deductive efficiency motivated their search, and currently, a great number of such classes is known. Nonetheless, they have been exclusively sought in the setting of clausal form and…

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…

In this paper we analyze k-ary inclusion-exclusion logic, INEX[k], which is obtained by extending first order logic with k-ary inclusion and exclusion atoms. We show that every formula of INEX[k] can be expressed with a formula of k-ary…

We study FO-rewritability of conjunctive queries in the presence of ontologies formulated in a description logic between EL and Horn-SHIF, along with related query containment problems. Apart from providing characterizations, we establish…

The monadic shallow linear (MSL) class is a decidable fragment of first-order Horn clauses that was discovered and rediscovered around the turn of the century, with applications in static analysis and verification. We propose a new class of…