Related papers: About the Expressive Power and Complexity of Order…
While modal extensions of decidable fragments of first-order logic are usually undecidable, their monodic counterparts, in which formulas in the scope of modal operators have at most one free variable, are typically decidable. This only…
Ordinary first-order logic has the property that two formulas \phi and \psi have the same meaning in a structure if and only if the formula ``\phi iff \psi'' is true in the structure. We prove that independence-friendly logic does not have…
We consider the two-variable fragment of first-order logic with one distinguished binary predicate constrained to be interpreted as a transitive relation. The finite satisfiability problem for this logic is shown to be decidable, in triply…
The uniform one-dimensional fragment of first-order logic was introduced a few years ago as a generalization of the two-variable fragment of first-order logic to contexts involving relations of arity greater than two. Quantifiers in this…
We consider two orthogonal points of view on finite permutations, seen as pairs of linear orders (corresponding to the usual one line representation of permutations as words) or seen as bijections (corresponding to the algebraic point of…
A condition, in two variants, is given such that if a property P satisfies this condition, then every logic which is at least as strong as first-order logic and can express P fails to have the compactness property. The result is used to…
Otto's Theorem characterises the bisimulation-invariant PTIME queries over graphs as exactly those that can be formulated in the polyadic mu-calculus, hinging on the Immerman-Vardi Theorem which characterises PTIME (over ordered structures)…
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 classical decision problem, as it is understood today, is the quest for a delineation between the decidable and the undecidable parts of first-order logic based on elegant syntactic criteria. In this paper, we treat the concept of…
It is well-known that extending the Hilbert axiomatic system for first-order intuitionistic logic with an exclusion operator, that is dual to implication, collapses the domains of models into a constant domain. This makes it an interesting…
We contribute to the refined understanding of the language-logic-algebra interplay in the context of first-order properties of countable words. We establish decidable algebraic characterizations of one variable fragment of FO as well as…
First-order logic is a natural way of expressing the properties of computation, traditionally used in various program logics for expressing the correctness properties and certificates. Subsequently, modern methods in the automated inference…
A classical result in descriptive complexity theory states that Datalog expresses exactly the class of polynomially computable queries on ordered databases. In this paper we extend this result to the case of higher-order Datalog. In…
None of the first-order modal logics between $\mathsf{K}$ and $\mathsf{S5}$ under the constant domain semantics enjoys Craig interpolation or projective Beth definability, even in the language restricted to a single individual variable. It…
We deal with first-order definability in the substructure ordering $(\mathcal{D}; \sqsubseteq)$ of finite directed graphs. In two papers, the author has already investigated the first-order language of the embeddability ordering $(…
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…
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…
A policy describes the conditions under which an action is permitted or forbidden. We show that a fragment of (multi-sorted) first-order logic can be used to represent and reason about policies. Because we use first-order logic, policies…
Courcelle's celebrated theorem states that all MSO-expressible properties can be decided in linear time on graphs of bounded treewidth. Unfortunately, the hidden constant implied by this theorem is a tower of exponentials whose height…
We consider two-variable first-order logic FO2 over infinite words. Restricting the number of nested negations defines an infinite hierarchy; its levels are often called the half-levels of the FO2 quantifier alternation hierarchy. For every…