Related papers: Decidability, Complexity, and Expressiveness of Fi…

We show that the existence of a first-order formula separating two monadic second order formulas over countable ordinal words is decidable. This extends the work of Henckell and Almeida on finite words, and of Place and Zeitoun on…

We consider a first-order logic for the integers with addition. This logic extends classical first-order logic by modulo-counting, threshold-counting and exact-counting quantifiers, all applied to tuples of variables (here, residues are…

We investigate a famous decision problem in automata theory: separation. Given a class of language C, the separation problem for C takes as input two regular languages and asks whether there exists a third one which belongs to C, includes…

We look at classes of languages associated to the fragment of first-order logic B{\Sigma}1 which disallows quantifier alternations. Each class is defined by choosing the set of predicates on positions that may be used. Two key such…

We study elementary modal logics, i.e. modal logic considered over first-order definable classes of frames. The classical semantics of modal logic allows infinite structures, but often practical applications require to restrict our…

It is proved that the first-order theory of the structure (N,mod) is undecidable. Here mod denotes the operation of computing the remainder for any division between positive integers; i.e. x mod y is the remainder obtained by the division x…

First-order temporal logics are notorious for their bad computational behaviour. It is known that even the two-variable monadic fragment is highly undecidable over various linear timelines, and over branching time even one-variable…

We consider the termination/non-termination property of a class of loops. Such loops are commonly used abstractions of real program pieces. Second-order logic is a convenient language to express non-termination. Of course, such property is…

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…

Higher-order unification has been shown to be undecidable. Miller discovered the pattern fragment and subsequently showed that higher-order pattern unification is decidable and has most general unifiers. We extend the algorithm to…

We consider extensions of monadic second order logic over $\omega$-words, which are obtained by adding one language that is not $\omega$-regular. We show that if the added language $L$ has a neutral letter, then the resulting logic is…

Constraint LTL, a generalisation of LTL over Presburger constraints, is often used as a formal language to specify the behavior of operational models with constraints. The freeze quantifier can be part of the language, as in some real-time…

The one-variable fragment of a first-order logic may be viewed as an "S5-like" modal logic, where the universal and existential quantifiers are replaced by box and diamond modalities, respectively. Axiomatizations of these modal logics have…

It was noticed by Harel in [Har86] that "one can define $\Sigma_1^1$-complete versions of the well-known Post Correspondence Problem". We first give a complete proof of this result, showing that the infinite Post Correspondence Problem in a…

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…

This paper explores the computational complexity of various natural one-variable fragments of first-order modal logics with the addition of counting quantifiers, over both constant and varying domains. The addition of counting quantifiers…

We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly…

It is well known that whenever a class of structures $\mathcal{K}_1$ is interpretable in a class of structures $\mathcal{K}_2$, then the hereditary undecidability of (a fragment of) the theory of $\mathcal{K}_1$ implies the hereditary…

We study first-order model checking, by which we refer to the problem of deciding whether or not a given first-order sentence is satisfied by a given finite structure. In particular, we aim to understand on which sets of sentences this…

We study word structures of the form $(D,<,P)$ where $D$ is either $\mathbb{N}$ or $\mathbb{Z}$, $<$ is the natural linear ordering on $D$ and $P\subseteq D$ is a predicate on $D$. In particular we show: (a) The set of recursive…