Related papers: Lecture Notes on Monadic First- and Second-Order L…
Monadic second order logic and linear temporal logic are two logical formalisms that can be used to describe classes of infinite words, i.e., first-order models based on the natural numbers with order, successor, and finitely many unary…
First-order linear temporal logic (FOLTL) is a flexible and expressive formalism capable of naturally describing complex behaviors and properties. Although the logic is in general highly undecidable, the idea of using it as a specification…
We study Monadic Second-Order Logic (MSO) over finite words, extended with (non-uniform arbitrary) monadic predicates. We show that it defines a class of languages that has algebraic, automata-theoretic and machine-independent…
We study logics defined in terms of second-order monadic monoidal and groupoidal quantifiers. These are generalized quantifiers defined by monoid and groupoid word-problems, equivalently, by regular and context-free languages. We give a…
This is a tutorial on finite automata. We present the standard material on determinization and minimization, as well as an account of the equivalence of finite automata and monadic second-order logic. We conclude with an introduction to the…
We consider two-variable first-order logic on finite words with a fixed number of quantifier alternations. We show that all languages with a neutral letter definable using the order and finite-degree predicates are also definable with the…
Weighted monadic second-order logic is a weighted extension of monadic second-order logic that captures exactly the behaviour of weighted automata. Its semantics is parameterized with respect to a semiring on which the values that weighted…
The connection between languages defined by computational models and logic for languages is well-studied. Monadic second-order logic and finite automata are shown to closely correspond to each-other for the languages of strings, trees, and…
Monadic second order logic is the expansion of first order logic by quantifiers ranging over unary relations. We study the shared monadic second order theory of finite linear orders, i.e. the pseudofinite monadic second order theory of…
We study FO+, a fragment of first-order logic on finite words, where monadic predicates can only appear positively. We show that there is a FO-definable language that is monotone in monadic predicates but not definable in FO+. This provides…
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…
Rational word languages can be defined by several equivalent means: finite state automata, rational expressions, finite congruences, or monadic second-order (MSO) logic. The robust subclass of aperiodic languages is defined by: counter-free…
Inspired by distributed algorithms, we introduce a new class of finite graph automata that recognize precisely the graph languages definable in monadic second-order logic. For the cases of words and trees, it has been long known that the…
The use of monoids in the study of word languages recognized by finite-state automata has been quite fruitful. In this work, we look at the same idea of "recognizability by finite monoids" for other monoids. In particular, we attempt to…
One of the main reasons for the correspondence of regular languages and monadic second-order logic is that the class of regular languages is closed under images of surjective letter-to-letter homomorphisms. This closure property holds for…
Since the 1970s with the work of McNaughton, Papert and Sch\"utzenberger, a regular language is known to be definable in the first-order logic if and only if its syntactic monoid is aperiodic. This algebraic characterisation of a…
In this paper we survey some surprising connections between group theory, the theory of automata and formal languages, the theory of ends, infinite games of perfect information, and monadic second-order logic.
We provide a denotational semantics for first-order logic that captures the two-level view of the computation process typical for constraint programming. At one level we have the usual program execution. At the other level an automatic…
Succinctness is a natural measure for comparing the strength of different logics. Intuitively, a logic L_1 is more succinct than another logic L_2 if all properties that can be expressed in L_2 can be expressed in L_1 by formulas of…
We introduce an extension of first-order logic that comes equipped with additional predicates for reasoning about an abstract state. Sequents in the logic comprise a main formula together with pre- and postconditions in the style of Hoare…