734 research outputs found
Changing a semantics: opportunism or courage?
The generalized models for higher-order logics introduced by Leon Henkin, and
their multiple offspring over the years, have become a standard tool in many
areas of logic. Even so, discussion has persisted about their technical status,
and perhaps even their conceptual legitimacy. This paper gives a systematic
view of generalized model techniques, discusses what they mean in mathematical
and philosophical terms, and presents a few technical themes and results about
their role in algebraic representation, calibrating provability, lowering
complexity, understanding fixed-point logics, and achieving set-theoretic
absoluteness. We also show how thinking about Henkin's approach to semantics of
logical systems in this generality can yield new results, dispelling the
impression of adhocness. This paper is dedicated to Leon Henkin, a deep
logician who has changed the way we all work, while also being an always open,
modest, and encouraging colleague and friend.Comment: 27 pages. To appear in: The life and work of Leon Henkin: Essays on
his contributions (Studies in Universal Logic) eds: Manzano, M., Sain, I. and
Alonso, E., 201
Inductive Definition and Domain Theoretic Properties of Fully Abstract
A construction of fully abstract typed models for PCF and PCF^+ (i.e., PCF +
"parallel conditional function"), respectively, is presented. It is based on
general notions of sequential computational strategies and wittingly consistent
non-deterministic strategies introduced by the author in the seventies.
Although these notions of strategies are old, the definition of the fully
abstract models is new, in that it is given level-by-level in the finite type
hierarchy. To prove full abstraction and non-dcpo domain theoretic properties
of these models, a theory of computational strategies is developed. This is
also an alternative and, in a sense, an analogue to the later game strategy
semantics approaches of Abramsky, Jagadeesan, and Malacaria; Hyland and Ong;
and Nickau. In both cases of PCF and PCF^+ there are definable universal
(surjective) functionals from numerical functions to any given type,
respectively, which also makes each of these models unique up to isomorphism.
Although such models are non-omega-complete and therefore not continuous in the
traditional terminology, they are also proved to be sequentially complete (a
weakened form of omega-completeness), "naturally" continuous (with respect to
existing directed "pointwise", or "natural" lubs) and also "naturally"
omega-algebraic and "naturally" bounded complete -- appropriate generalisation
of the ordinary notions of domain theory to the case of non-dcpos.Comment: 50 page
FICS 2010
International audienceInformal proceedings of the 7th workshop on Fixed Points in Computer Science (FICS 2010), held in Brno, 21-22 August 201
Accommodating prepositional phrases in a highly modular natural language query interface to semantic web triplestores using a novel event-based denotational semantics for English and a set of functional parser combinators
The SemanticWeb is an emerging component of the set of technologies that will be known as Web 3.0 in the future. With the large changes it brings to how information is stored and represented to users, there is a need to re-evaluate how this information can be queried. Specifically, there is a need for Natural Language Interfaces that allow users to easily query for information on the Semantic Web. While there has been previous work in this area, existing solutions suffer from the problem that they do not support prepositional phrases in queries (e.g, “in 1958” or “with a key”). To achieve this, we improve on an existing semantics for event-based triplestores that supports prepositional phrases and demonstrate a novel method of handling the word “by”, treating it directly as a preposition in queries. We then show how this new semantics can be integrated with a parser constructed as an executable attribute grammar to create a highly modular and extensible Natural Language Interface to the Semantic Web that supports prepositional phrases in queries
Retractions in comparing PROLOG semantics
We present an operational model O and a continuation based denotational model D for a
uniform variant of PROLOG, including the cut operator. The two semantical definitions make
use of higher order transformations Phi and Psi, respectively. We prove O and D equivalent
in a novel way by comparing yet another pair of higher order transformations Phi~ and Psi~, that yield Phi and Psi, respectively, by application of a suitable abstraction operator
Higher Order Automatic Differentiation of Higher Order Functions
We present semantic correctness proofs of automatic differentiation (AD). We
consider a forward-mode AD method on a higher order language with algebraic
data types, and we characterise it as the unique structure preserving macro
given a choice of derivatives for basic operations. We describe a rich
semantics for differentiable programming, based on diffeological spaces. We
show that it interprets our language, and we phrase what it means for the AD
method to be correct with respect to this semantics. We show that our
characterisation of AD gives rise to an elegant semantic proof of its
correctness based on a gluing construction on diffeological spaces. We explain
how this is, in essence, a logical relations argument. Throughout, we show how
the analysis extends to AD methods for computing higher order derivatives using
a Taylor approximation.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, submitted at LMCS 2020. arXiv admin note:
substantial text overlap with arXiv:2001.0220
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