Related papers: Expressing Properties in Second and Third Order Lo…
Descriptive complexity theory aims at inferring a problem's computational complexity from the syntactic complexity of its description. A cornerstone of this theory is Fagin's Theorem, by which a graph property is expressible in existential…
By Fagin's Theorem, NP contains precisely those problems that can be described by formulas starting with an existential second-order quantifier, followed by only first-order quantifiers (ESO formulas). Subsequent research refined this…
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…
For every $q\in \mathbb N$ let $\textrm{FO}_q$ denote the class of sentences of first-order logic FO of quantifier rank at most $q$. If a graph property can be defined in $\textrm{FO}_q$, then it can be decided in time $O(n^q)$. Thus,…
Fagin defined the class $NP$ by the means of Existential Second-Order logic. Feder and Vardi expressed it (up to polynomial equivalence) by special fragments of Existential Second-Order logic (SNP), while the authors used forbidden expanded…
Extensional ESO is a fragment of existential second-order logic (ESO) that captures the following family of problems. Given a fixed ESO sentence $\Psi$ and an input structure $\mathbb A$ the task if to decide whether there is an extension…
We study the complexity of evaluating positive equality-free sentences of first-order (FO) logic over a fixed, finite structure B. This may be seen as a natural generalisation of the non-uniform quantified constraint satisfaction problem…
In the framework of computable queries in Database Theory, there are many examples of queries to (properties of) relational database instances that can be expressed by simple and elegant third order logic ($\mathrm{TO}$) formulae. In many…
A new syntactic characterization of problems complete via Turing reductions is presented. General canonical forms are developed in order to define such problems. One of these forms allows us to define complete problems on ordered…
We characterise the sentences in Monadic Second-order Logic (MSO) that are over finite structures equivalent to a Datalog program, in terms of an existential pebble game. We also show that for every class C of finite structures that can be…
The complexity class $NP$ can be logically characterized both through existential second order logic $SO\exists$, as proven by Fagin, and through simulating a Turing machine via the satisfiability problem of propositional logic SAT, as…
In this paper we provide purely model-theoretic (algebraic) characterisations for classes definable in second-order logic and for pseudo-elementary classes (including PC and PC_{\Delta} classes). Classical results of this flavour include…
We show that the maximum clique problem (decision version) can be expressed in existential second order (ESO) logic, where the first order part is a Horn formula in second-order quantified predicates. Without ordering, the first order part…
We study two extensions of FO2[<], first-order logic interpreted in finite words, in which formulas are restricted to use only two variables. We adjoin to this language two-variable atomic formulas that say, "the letter $a$ appears between…
Descriptive Complexity has been very successful in characterizing complexity classes of decision problems in terms of the properties definable in some logics. However, descriptive complexity for counting complexity classes, such as FP and…
In this work we continue the syntactic study of completeness that began with the works of Immerman and Medina. In particular, we take a conjecture raised by Medina in his dissertation that says if a conjunction of a second-order and a…
We study the expressive powers of SO-HORN$^{*}$, SO-HORN$^{r}$ and SO-HORN$^{*r}$ on all finite structures. We show that SO-HORN$^{r}$, SO-HORN$^{*r}$, FO(LFP) coincide with each other and SO-HORN$^{*}$ is proper sublogic of SO-HORN$^{r}$.…
Series-parallel (SP) graphs are binary edge-labeled graphs with a designated source and target vertex, built using serial and parallel composition. A set of graphs is recognizable if membership depends only on its image under a homomorphism…
The class of problems complete for NP via first-order reductions is known to be characterized by existential second-order sentences of a fixed form. All such sentences are built around the so-called generalized IS-form of the sentence that…
Standard answer set programming (ASP) targets at solving search problems from the first level of the polynomial time hierarchy (PH). Tackling search problems beyond NP using ASP is less straightforward. The class of disjunctive logic…