Related papers: Soundness conditions for big-step semantics
It is important that practical data-flow analyzers are backed by reliably proven theoretical results. Abstract interpretation provides a sound mathematical framework and necessary generic properties for an abstract domain to be well-defined…
A common standpoint when designing the syntax of programming languages is that the grammar definition has to be unambiguous. However, requiring up front unambiguous grammars can force language designers to make more or less arbitrary…
Representing speech as discrete tokens provides a framework for transforming speech into a format that closely resembles text, thus enabling the use of speech as an input to the widely successful large language models (LLMs). Currently,…
Large language models show improved downstream task performance when prompted to generate step-by-step reasoning to justify their final answers. These reasoning steps greatly improve model interpretability and verification, but objectively…
Manual annotations are a prerequisite for many applications of machine learning. However, weaknesses in the annotation process itself are easy to overlook. In particular, scholars often choose what information to give to annotators without…
In search for a foundational framework for reasoning about observable behavior of programs that may not terminate, we have previously devised a trace-based big-step semantics for While. In this semantics, both traces and evaluation…
Intent classification is crucial for conversational agents (chatbots), and deep learning models perform well in this area. However, little research has been done on the explainability of intent classification due to the absence of suitable…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of explainable fact-checking through a series of experiments, focusing on the ability of large language models to verify public health claims and provide explanations or justifications for their…
Term rewriting systems have a simple syntax and semantics and facilitate proofs of correctness. However, they are not as popular in industry or academia as imperative languages. We define a term rewriting based abstract programming language…
A new technique is presented to prove non-termination of term rewriting. The basic idea is to find a non-empty regular language of terms that is closed under rewriting and does not contain normal forms. It is automated by representing the…
Mathematics formalisation is the task of writing mathematics (i.e., definitions, theorem statements, proofs) in natural language, as found in books and papers, into a formal language that can then be checked for correctness by a program. It…
Answer set programming is one of the most praised frameworks for declarative programming in general and non-monotonic reasoning in particular. There has been many efforts to extend stable model semantics so that answer set programs can use…
Targeted syntactic evaluations of language models ask whether models show stable preferences for syntactically acceptable content over minimal-pair unacceptable inputs. Most targeted syntactic evaluation datasets ask models to make these…
Graded Type Theory provides a mechanism to track and reason about resource usage in type systems. In this paper, we develop GraD, a novel version of such a graded dependent type system that includes functions, tensor products, additive…
We explore denotational interpreters: denotational semantics that produce coinductive traces of a corresponding small-step operational semantics. By parameterising our denotational interpreter over the semantic domain and then varying it,…
The Dependent Object Type (DOT) calculus was designed to put Scala on a sound basis, but while DOT relies on structural subtyping, Scala is a fundamentally class-based language. This impedance mismatch means that a proof of DOT soundness by…
Large pre-trained language models perform remarkably well on tasks that can be done "in one pass", such as generating realistic text or synthesizing computer programs. However, they struggle with tasks that require unbounded multi-step…
We describe a denotational semantics for an abstract effect system for a higher-order, shared-variable concurrent programming language. We prove the soundness of a number of general effect-based program equivalences, including a…
Splitting a logic program allows us to reduce the task of computing its stable models to similar tasks for its subprograms. This can be used to increase solving performance and prove program correctness. We generalize the conditions under…
Value independence is enormously beneficial for reasoning about software systems at scale. These benefits carry over into the world of formal verification. Reasoning about programs algebraically is a simple affair in a proof assistant,…