Related papers: Designing a semantic model for a wide-spectrum lan…

Runtime efficiency and termination are crucial properties in the studies of program verification. Instead of dealing with these issues in an ad hoc manner, it would be useful to develop a robust framework in which such properties are…

Language models now provide an interface to express and often solve general problems in natural language, yet their ultimate computational capabilities remain a major topic of scientific debate. Unlike a formal computer, a language model is…

Many logic programming based approaches can be used to describe and solve combinatorial search problems. On the one hand there is constraint logic programming which computes a solution as an answer substitution to a query containing the…

This thesis concerns the development of a framework that facilitates the design and analysis of formal systems. Specifically, this framework provides a specification language which supports the concise and direct description of formal…

As Web sites are now ordinary products, it is necessary to explicit the notion of quality of a Web site. The quality of a site may be linked to the easiness of accessibility and also to other criteria such as the fact that the site is up to…

Large language models (LLMs) enable strong text generation, and in general there is a practical tradeoff between fine-tuning and prompt engineering. We introduce Simplify-This, a comparative study evaluating both paradigms for text…

We show that explicit pragmatic inference aids in correctly generating and following natural language instructions for complex, sequential tasks. Our pragmatics-enabled models reason about why speakers produce certain instructions, and…

Formalisms for specifying statistical models, such as probabilistic-programming languages, typically consist of two components: a specification of a stochastic process (the prior), and a specification of observations that restrict the…

A wide range of constraints can be compactly specified using automata or formal languages. In a sequence of recent papers, we have shown that an effective means to reason with such specifications is to decompose them into primitive…

Many logic programming based approaches can be used to describe and solve combinatorial search problems. On the one hand there are definite programs and constraint logic programs that compute a solution as an answer substitution to a query…

We study program refactoring while considering the language or even the programming paradigm as a parameter. We use typed functional programs, namely Haskell programs, as the specification medium for a corresponding refactoring framework.…

Reference models in form of best practices are an essential element to ensured knowledge as design for reuse. Popular modeling approaches do not offer mechanisms to embed reference models in a supporting way, let alone a repository of it.…

One of the basic sanity properties of a behavioural semantics is that it constitutes a congruence with respect to standard process operators. This issue has been traditionally addressed by the development of rule formats for transition…

We present a technique for deriving semantic program analyses from a natural semantics specification of the programming language. The technique is based on a particular kind of semantics called pretty-big-step semantics. We present a…

Refinement types are types equipped with predicates that specify preconditions and postconditions of underlying functional languages. We propose a general semantic construction of dependent refinement type systems from underlying type…

We present a semantics of a probabilistic while-language with soft conditioning and continuous distributions which handles programs diverging with positive probability. To this end, we extend the probabilistic guarded command language…

Game semantics is a powerful method of semantic analysis for programming languages. It gives mathematically accurate models ("fully abstract") for a wide variety of programming languages. Game semantic models are combinatorial…

Consistency, which refers to the capability of generating the same predictions for semantically similar contexts, is a highly desirable property for a sound language understanding model. Although recent pretrained language models (PLMs)…

In programming models with a reversible semantics, computational steps can be undone. This paper addresses the integration of reversible semantics into process languages for communication-centric systems equipped with behavioral types. In…

Early stages of system development involve outlining desired features such as functionality, availability, or usability. Specifications are derived from these features that concretize vague ideas presented in natural languages. The…