Related papers: Structural properties of the first-order transduct…
We study various aspects of the first-order transduction quasi-order on graph classes, which provides a way of measuring the relative complexity of graph classes based on whether one can encode the other using a formula of first-order (FO)…
Transductions are a general formalism for expressing transformations of graphs (and more generally, of relational structures) in logic. We prove that a graph class $\mathscr{C}$ can be $\mathsf{FO}$-transduced from a class of bounded-height…
We study on which classes of graphs first-order logic (FO) and monadic second-order logic (MSO) have the same expressive power. We show that for all classes C of graphs that are closed under taking subgraphs, FO and MSO have the same…
First-order logic is known to have limited expressive power over finite structures. It enjoys in particular the locality property, which states that first-order formulae cannot have a global view of a structure. This limitation ensures on…
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…
Classes with bounded rankwidth are MSO-transductions of trees and classes with bounded linear rankwidth are MSO-transductions of paths -- a result that shows a strong link between the properties of these graph classes considered from the…
We study the first-order (FO) model checking problem of dense graphs, namely those which have FO interpretations in (or are FO transductions of) some sparse graph classes. We give a structural characterization of the graph classes which are…
We study the expressive power and succinctness of order-invariant sentences of first-order (FO) and monadic second-order (MSO) logic on structures of bounded tree-depth. Order- invariance is undecidable in general and, thus, one strives for…
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,…
First-order logic (FO) can express many algorithmic problems on graphs, such as the independent set and dominating set problem, parameterized by solution size. On the other hand, FO cannot express the very simple algorithmic question of…
A transduction provides us with a way of using the monadic second-order language of a structure to make statements about a derived structure. Any transduction induces a relation on the set of these structures. This article presents a…
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…
Graph transformations definable in logic can be described using the notion of transductions. By understanding transductions as a basic embedding mechanism, which captures the possibility of encoding one graph in another graph by means of…
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…
We study property testing of properties that are definable in first-order logic (FO) in the bounded-degree graph and relational structure models. We show that any FO property that is defined by a formula with quantifier prefix…
We study two notions of being well-structured for classes of graphs that are inspired by classic model theory. A class of graphs $C$ is monadically stable if it is impossible to define arbitrarily long linear orders in vertex-colored graphs…
For a sequence of random structures with $n$-element domains over a relational signature, we define its first order (FO) complexity as a certain subset in the Banach space $\ell^{\infty}/c_0$. The well-known FO zero-one law and FO…
We prove that, on bounded expansion classes, every first-order formula with modulo counting is equivalent, in a linear-time computable monadic expansion, to an existential first-order formula. As a consequence, we derive, on bounded…
We propose to study transformations on graphs, and more generally structures, by looking at how the cut-rank (as introduced by Oum) of subsets is affected when going from the input structure to the output structure. We consider…
We consider a specific class of tree structures that can represent basic structures in linguistics and computer science such as XML documents, parse trees, and treebanks, namely, finite node-labeled sibling-ordered trees. We present…