Related papers: Automata with Nested Pebbles Capture First-Order L…
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…
We study deterministic tree-walking-storage automata, which are finite-state devices equipped with a tree-like storage. These automata are generalized stack automata, where the linear stack storage is replaced by a non-linear tree-like…
These notes present the essentials of first- and second-order monadic logics on strings with introductory purposes. We discuss Monadic First-Order logic and show that it is strictly less expressive than Finite-State Automata, in that it…
We study the first-order model checking problem on two generalisations of pushdown graphs. The first class is the class of nested pushdown trees. The other is the class of collapsible pushdown graphs. Our main results are the following.…
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…
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…
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…
Nested words are a structured model of execution paths in procedural programs, reflecting their call and return nesting structure. Finite nested words also capture the structure of parse trees and other tree-structured data, such as XML. We…
The first-order theory of a string automatic structure is known to be decidable, but there are examples of string automatic structures with nonelementary first-order theories. We prove that the first-order theory of a string automatic…
The class of Boolean combinations of tree languages recognized by deterministic top-down tree automata (also known as deterministic root-to-frontier automata) is studied. The problem of determining for a given regular tree language whether…
We introduce a novel automata model, called pebble-intervals automata (PIA), and study its power and closure properties. PIAs are tailored for a decidable fragment of FO that is important for reasoning about structures that use data values…
The call-by-value language RML may be viewed as a canonical restriction of Standard ML to ground-type references, augmented by a "bad variable" construct in the sense of Reynolds. We consider the fragment of (finitary) RML terms of order at…
Let A be a finite alphabet and let L contained in (A*)^n be an n-variable language over A. We say that L is regular if it is the language accepted by a synchronous n-tape finite state automaton, it is quasi-regular if it is accepted by an…
We introduce the branching transitive closure operator on weighted monadic second-order logic formulas where the branching corresponds in a natural way to the branching inherent in trees. For arbitrary commutative semirings, we prove that…
Automata-logic connections are pillars of the theory of regular languages. Such connections are harder to obtain for transducers, but important results have been obtained recently for word-to-word transformations, showing that the three…
We study the expressive power of First-Order Logic (\FO) over (unordered) infinite trees, with the aim of identifying robust characterisations in terms of branching-time specification formalisms. While such correspondences are well…
In this paper, we study First Order Logic (FO) over (unordered) infinite trees and its connection with branching-time temporal logics. More specifically, we provide an automata-theoretic characterisation of FO interpreted over infinite…
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…
Temporal logics are widely used by the Formal Methods and AI communities. Linear Temporal Logic is a popular temporal logic and is valued for its ease of use as well as its balance between expressiveness and complexity. LTL is equivalent in…
One-dimensional fragment of first-order logic is obtained by restricting quantification to blocks of existential (universal) quantifiers that leave at most one variable free. We investigate this fragment over words and trees, presenting a…