Related papers: The First-Order Theory of Ground Tree Rewrite Grap…
We say that a first order formula A distinguishes a graph G from another graph G' if A is true on G and false on G'. Provided G and G' are non-isomorphic, let D(G,G') denote the minimal quantifier rank of a such formula. We prove that, if G…
The general form of safe recursion (or ramified recurrence) can be expressed by an infinite graph rewrite system including unfolding graph rewrite rules introduced by Dal Lago, Martini and Zorzi, in which the size of every normal form by…
The first-order theory of a string automatic structure is known to be decidable, but there are examples of string automatic structures with nonelementary first-order theories. We prove that the first-order theory of a string automatic…
A graph class $\mathscr{C}$ is called monadically stable if one cannot interpret, in first-order logic, arbitrary large linear orders in colored graphs from $\mathscr{C}$. We prove that the model checking problem for first-order logic is…
First-order logic is known to have limited expressive power over finite structures. It enjoys in particular the locality property, which states that first-order formulae cannot have a global view of a structure. This limitation ensures on…
We study problems connected to first-order logic in graphs of bounded twin-width. Inspired by the approach of Bonnet et al. [FOCS 2020], we introduce a robust methodology of local types and describe their behavior in contraction sequences…
For a sequence of random structures with $n$-element domains over a relational signature, we define its first order (FO) complexity as a certain subset in the Banach space $\ell^{\infty}/c_0$. The well-known FO zero-one law and FO…
An order-theoretic forest is a countable partial order such that the set of elements larger than any element is linearly ordered. It is an order-theoretic tree if any two elements have an upper-bound. The order type of a branch can be any…
We deal with first-order definability in the substructure ordering $(\mathcal{D}; \sqsubseteq)$ of finite directed graphs. In two papers, the author has already investigated the first-order language of the embeddability ordering $(…
So far, a very large amount of work in Natural Language Processing (NLP) rely on trees as the core mathematical structure to represent linguistic informations (e.g. in Chomsky's work). However, some linguistic phenomena do not cope properly…
The model theory based notion of the first order convergence unifies the notions of the left-convergence for dense structures and the Benjamini-Schramm convergence for sparse structures. It is known that every first order convergent…
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 explore from an algebraic viewpoint the properties of the tree languages definable with a first-order formula involving the ancestor predicate, using the description of these languages as those recognized by iterated block products of…
We prove several negative results about first-order transducibility for classes of sparse graphs: - for every $t \in \mathbb{N}$, the class of graphs of treewidth at most $t+1$ is not transducible from the class of graphs of treewidth at…
A labeled oriented graph (LOG) is an oriented graph with a labeling function from the edge set into the vertex set. The complexity of a LOG is the minimal cardinality of an initial set $S$ of vertices such that every vertex can be reached…
We characterise the classes of tournaments with tractable first-order model checking. For every hereditary class of tournaments $\mathcal T$, first-order model checking is either fixed parameter tractable or $\textrm{AW}[*]$-hard. This…
The kTree problem is a special case of Subgraph Isomorphism where the pattern graph is a tree, that is, the input is an $n$-node graph $G$ and a $k$-node tree $T$, and the goal is to determine whether $G$ has a subgraph isomorphic to $T$.…
This paper studies the "explanation problem" for tree- and linearly-ordered array data, a problem motivated by database applications and recently solved for the one-dimensional tree-ordered case. In this paper, one is given a matrix A whose…
A {\it tiered graph} $G=(V,E)$ with $m $ tiers is a simple graph with $V\subseteq \brk{n}$, where $\brk{n}=\{1,2,\cdots,n\}$, and with a surjective map $t$ from $V$ to $\brk{m}$ such that if $v$ is a vertex adjacent to $v'$ in $G$ with…
We give new decomposition theorems for classes of graphs that can be transduced in first-order logic from classes of sparse graphs -- more precisely, from classes of bounded expansion and from nowhere dense classes. In both cases, the…