Related papers: Existential Second-Order Logic Over Graphs: A Comp…
The Guarded Negation Fragment (GNFO) is a fragment of first-order logic that contains all positive existential formulas, can express the first-order translations of basic modal logic and of many description logics, along with many sentences…
Constraint propagation is one of the basic forms of inference in many logic-based reasoning systems. In this paper, we investigate constraint propagation for first-order logic (FO), a suitable language to express a wide variety of…
The description complexity of a model is the length of the shortest formula that defines the model. We study the description complexity of unary structures in first-order logic FO, also drawing links to semantic complexity in the form of…
Second-order transitive-closure logic, SO(TC), is an expressive declarative language that captures the complexity class PSPACE. Already its monadic fragment, MSO(TC), allows the expression of various NP-hard and even PSPACE-hard problems in…
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 give topological and algebraic characterizations as well as language theoretic descriptions of the following subclasses of first-order logic FO[<] for omega-languages: Sigma_2, FO^2, the intersection of FO^2 and Sigma_2, and Delta_2 (and…
One of the most important algorithmic meta-theorems is a famous result by Courcelle, which states that any graph problem definable in monadic second-order logic with edge-set quantifications (i.e., MSO2 model-checking) is decidable in…
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 logic FO(~), the extension of first-order logic with team semantics by unrestricted Boolean negation. It was recently shown axiomatizable, but otherwise has not yet received much attention in questions of computational…
Order-invariant formulas access an ordering on a structure's universe, but the model relation is independent of the used ordering. Order invariance is frequently used for logic-based approaches in computer science. Order-invariant formulas…
We develop a proof-theoretic semantics (P-tS) for second-order logic (S-oL), providing an inferentialist alternative to both full and Henkin model-theoretic interpretations. Our approach is grounded in base-extension semantics (B-eS), a…
One of the main reasons to employ a description logic such as EL or EL++ is the fact that it has efficient, polynomial-time algorithmic properties such as deciding consistency and inferring subsumption. However, simply by adding negation of…
We systematically investigate the complexity of model checking the existential positive fragment of first-order logic. In particular, for a set of existential positive sentences, we consider model checking where the sentence is restricted…
Tractability results for the model checking problem of logics yield powerful algorithmic meta theorems of the form: Every computational problem expressible in a logic $L$ can be solved efficiently on every class $\mathscr{C}$ of structures…
We study FO+, a fragment of first-order logic on finite words, where monadic predicates can only appear positively. We show that there is an FO-definable language that is monotone in monadic predicates but not definable in FO+. This…
We investigate the extent of second order characterizable structures by extending Shelah's Main Gap dichotomy to second order logic. For this end we consider a countable complete first order theory T. We show that all sufficiently large…
This paper settles the computational complexity of model checking of several extensions of the monadic second order (MSO) logic on two classes of graphs: graphs of bounded treewidth and graphs of bounded neighborhood diversity. A classical…
It is known that first-order logic with some counting extensions can be efficiently evaluated on graph classes with bounded expansion, where depth-$r$ minors have constant density. More precisely, the formulas are $\exists x_1 ... x_k \#y…
Let $F$ be a connected graph with $\ell$ vertices. The existence of a subgraph isomorphic to $F$ can be defined in first-order logic with quantifier depth no better than $\ell$, simply because no first-order formula of smaller quantifier…
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…