Related papers: A Comparison of Big-step Semantics Definition Styl…
This paper explores how natural-language descriptions of formal languages can be compared to their formal representations and how semantic differences can be explained. This is motivated from educational scenarios where learners describe a…
Strong equivalence between knowledge bases ensures the possibility of replacing one with the other without affecting reasoning outcomes, in any given context. This makes it a crucial property in nonmonotonic formalisms. In particular, the…
Call a semantics for a language with variables absolute when variables map to fixed entities in the denotation. That is, a semantics is absolute when the denotation of a variable a is a copy of itself in the denotation. We give a trio of…
Semantic parsing offers many opportunities to improve natural language understanding. We present a semantically annotated parallel corpus for English, German, Italian, and Dutch where sentences are aligned with scoped meaning…
Temporal logics stands for a widely adopted family of formalisms for the verification of computational devices, enriching propositional logics by operators predicating on the step-wise behaviour of a system. Its quantified extensions allow…
Step-by-step reasoning is widely used to enhance the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in complex problems. Evaluating the quality of reasoning traces is crucial for understanding and improving LLM reasoning. However,…
The operational semantics of a programming language is said to be small-step if each transition step is an atomic computation step in the language. A semantics with this property faithfully corresponds to the implementation of the language.…
Normative reasoning is a type of reasoning that involves normative or deontic modality, such as obligation and permission. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various reasoning tasks, their…
Algorithms like those for differentiating functional expressions manipulate the syntactic structure of mathematical expressions in a mathematically meaningful way. A formalization of such an algorithm should include a specification of its…
Dynamically typed languages, like Erlang, allow developers to quickly write programs without explicitly providing any type information on expressions or function definitions. However, this feature makes those languages less reliable than…
In this article, we discuss a flow--sensitive analysis of equality relationships for imperative programs. We describe its semantic domains, general purpose operations over abstract computational states (term evaluation and identification,…
We present a Coq formalisation of the small-step operational semantics of Jafun, a small Java-like language with classes. This format of semantics makes it possible to naturally specify and prove invariants that should hold at each…
Probabilistic programming provides a convenient lingua franca for writing succinct and rigorous descriptions of probabilistic models and inference tasks. Several probabilistic programming languages, including Anglican, Church or Hakaru,…
Program correctness used to be the main concern of computer software in the early days when formal semantics was a hot topic. But, the word "correct" was afterwards replaced by reliable, robust and trustworthy etc., a tradeoff situation…
Today, with the emergence of semantic web technologies and increasing of information quantity, searching for information based on the semantic web has become a fertile area of research. For this reason, a large number of studies are…
Erlang's dynamic typing discipline can lead to runtime errors that persist even after process restarts. Some of these runtime errors could be prevented through static type checking. While Erlang provides a type specification language, the…
Modeling languages in software engineering (e.g., UML) evolved from software systems modeling where denotational and operational kinds of semantics are the traditional subjects of research and practice. According to some authors, although a…
The proposed framework provides a general model of concurrent imperative programming. Programs are modeled as formal languages and concurrency as an interleaving (or shuffle) operator. This yields a simple and elegant algebra of programs.…
We propose a general proof technique to show that a predicate is sound, that is, prevents stuck computation, with respect to a big-step semantics. This result may look surprising, since in big-step semantics there is no difference between…
This paper develops a new framework for program synthesis, called semantics-guided synthesis (SemGuS), that allows a user to provide both the syntax and the semantics for the constructs in the language. SemGuS accepts a recursively defined…