66 research outputs found
Transitive Closure Logic and Multihead Automata with Nested Pebbles
Several extensions of first-order logic are studied in descriptive complexity theory. These extensions include transitive closure logic and deterministic transitive closure logic, which extend first-order logic with transitive closure operators. It is known that deterministic transitive closure logic captures the complexity class of the languages that are decidable by some deterministic Turing machine using a logarithmic amount of memory space. An analogous result holds for transitive closure logic and nondeterministic Turing machines.
This thesis concerns the k-ary fragments of these two logics. In each k-ary fragment, the arities of transitive closure operators appearing in formulas are restricted to a nonzero natural number k. The expressivity of these fragments can be studied in terms of multihead finite automata. The type of automaton that we consider in this thesis is a two-way multihead automaton with nested pebbles.
We look at the expressive power of multihead automata and the k-ary fragments of transitive closure logics in the class of finite structures called word models. We show that deterministic twoway k-head automata with nested pebbles have the same expressive power as first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive closure. For a corresponding result in the case of nondeterministic automata, we restrict to the positive fragment of k-ary transitive closure logic. The two theorems and their proofs are based on the article ’Automata with nested pebbles capture first-order logic with transitive closure’ by Joost Engelfriet and Hendrik Jan Hoogeboom. In the article, the results are proved in the case of trees. Since word models can be viewed as a special type of trees, the theorems considered in this thesis are a special case of a more general result
Automata with Nested Pebbles Capture First-Order Logic with Transitive Closure
String languages recognizable in (deterministic) log-space are characterized
either by two-way (deterministic) multi-head automata, or following Immerman,
by first-order logic with (deterministic) transitive closure. Here we elaborate
this result, and match the number of heads to the arity of the transitive
closure. More precisely, first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive
closure has the same power as deterministic automata walking on their input
with k heads, additionally using a finite set of nested pebbles. This result is
valid for strings, ordered trees, and in general for families of graphs having
a fixed automaton that can be used to traverse the nodes of each of the graphs
in the family. Other examples of such families are grids, toruses, and
rectangular mazes. For nondeterministic automata, the logic is restricted to
positive occurrences of transitive closure.
The special case of k=1 for trees, shows that single-head deterministic
tree-walking automata with nested pebbles are characterized by first-order
logic with unary deterministic transitive closure. This refines our earlier
result that placed these automata between first-order and monadic second-order
logic on trees.Comment: Paper for Logical Methods in Computer Science, 27 pages, 1 figur
Advances and applications of automata on words and trees : abstracts collection
From 12.12.2010 to 17.12.2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10501 "Advances and Applications of Automata on Words and Trees" was held in Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Transitive closure logic, nested tree walking automata, and XPath
International audienceWe study FO(MTC), first-order logic with monadic transitive closure, a logical formalism in between FO and MSO on trees. We characterize the expressive power of FO(MTC) in terms of nested tree-walking automata. Using the latter, we show that FO(MTC) is strictly less expressive than MSO, solving an open problem. We also present a temporal logic on trees that is expressively complete for FO(MTC), in the form of an extension of the XML document navigation language XPath with two operators: the Kleene star for taking the transitive closure of path expressions, and a subtree relativisation operator, allowing one to restrict attention to a specific subtree while evaluating a subexpression. We show that the expressive power of this XPath dialect equals that of FO(MTC) for Boolean, unary and binary queries. We also investigate the complexity of the automata model as well as the XPath dialect. We show that query evaluation be done in polynomial time (combined complexity), but that emptiness (or, satisfiability) is 2ExpTime-complete
Logical Characterization of Weighted Pebble Walking Automata
International audienceWeighted automata are a conservative quantitative extension of finite automata that enjoys applications, e.g., in language processing and speech recognition. Their expressive power, however, appears to be limited, especially when they are applied to more general structures than words, such as graphs. To address this drawback, weighted automata have recently been generalized to weighted pebble walking automata, which proved useful as a tool for the specification and evaluation of quantitative properties over words and nested words. In this paper, we establish the expressive power of weighted pebble walking automata in terms of transitive closure logic, lifting a similar result by Engelfriet and Hoogeboom from the Boolean case to a quantitative setting. This result applies to a general class of graphs that subsumes all the aforementioned classes
The Arity Hierarchy in the Polyadic -Calculus
The polyadic mu-calculus is a modal fixpoint logic whose formulas define
relations of nodes rather than just sets in labelled transition systems. It can
express exactly the polynomial-time computable and bisimulation-invariant
queries on finite graphs. In this paper we show a hierarchy result with respect
to expressive power inside the polyadic mu-calculus: for every level of
fixpoint alternation, greater arity of relations gives rise to higher
expressive power. The proof uses a diagonalisation argument.Comment: In Proceedings FICS 2015, arXiv:1509.0282
Pebble Weighted Automata and Weighted Logics
34 pagesInternational audienceWe introduce new classes of weighted automata on words. Equipped with pebbles, they go beyond the class of recognizable formal power series: they capture weighted first-order logic enriched with a quantitative version of transitive closure. In contrast to previous work, this calculus allows for unrestricted use of existential and universal quantifications over positions of the input word. We actually consider both two-way and one-way pebble weighted automata. The latter class constrains the head of the automaton to walk left-to-right, resetting it each time a pebble is dropped. Such automata have already been considered in the Boolean setting, in the context of data words. Our main result states that two-way pebble weighted automata, one- way pebble weighted automata, and our weighted logic are expressively equivalent. We also give new logical characterizations of standard recognizable series
Pebble alternating tree-walking automata and their recognizing power
Pebble tree-walking automata with alternation were first investigated by Milo, Suciu and Vianu (2003), who showed that tree languages recognized by these devices are exactly the regular tree languages. We strengthen this by proving the same result for pebble automata with "strong pebble handling" which means that pebbles can be lifted independently of the position of the reading head and without moving the reading head. Then we make a comparison among some restricted versions of these automata. We will show that the deterministic and non-looping pebble alternating tree-walking automata are strictly less powerful than their nondeterministic counterparts, i.e., they do not recognize all the regular tree languages. Moreover, there is a proper hierarchy of recognizing capacity of deterministic and non-looping n-pebble alternating tree-walking automata with respect to the number of pebbles, i.e., for each n ≥ 0, deterministic and non-looping (n+1)-pebble alternating tree-walking automata are more powerful than their n-pebble counterparts
First-Order and Temporal Logics for Nested Words
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 provide new temporal logics for finite and infinite nested
words, which are natural extensions of LTL, and prove that these logics are
first-order expressively-complete. One of them is based on adding a "within"
modality, evaluating a formula on a subword, to a logic CaRet previously
studied in the context of verifying properties of recursive state machines
(RSMs). The other logic, NWTL, is based on the notion of a summary path that
uses both the linear and nesting structures. For NWTL we show that
satisfiability is EXPTIME-complete, and that model-checking can be done in time
polynomial in the size of the RSM model and exponential in the size of the NWTL
formula (and is also EXPTIME-complete). Finally, we prove that first-order
logic over nested words has the three-variable property, and we present a
temporal logic for nested words which is complete for the two-variable fragment
of first-order.Comment: revised and corrected version of Mar 03, 201
Trial for RDF: adapting graph query languages for RDF data
Querying RDF data is viewed as one of the main applications of graph query languages, and yet the standard model of graph databases – essentially labeled graphs – is different from the triples-based model of RDF. While encodings of RDF databases into graph data exist, we show that even the most natural ones are bound to lose somefunctionalitywhenused inconjunctionwith graph query languages. The solution is to work directly with triples, but then many properties taken for granted in the graphdatabasecontext(e.g., reachability)losetheir natural meaning. Our goal is to introduce languages that work directly over triples and are closed, i.e., they produce sets of triples, ratherthan graphs. Our basiclanguageis called TriAL, or Triple Algebra: it guarantees closure properties by replacing the product with a family of join operations. We extend TriAL with recursion, and explain why such an extension is more intricate for triples than for graphs. We present a declarative language, namely a fragment of datalog, capturing the recursive algebra. For both languages, the combined complexity of query evaluation is given by low-degree polynomials. We compare our languages with relational languages, such as finite-variable logics, and previously studied graph query languages such as adaptations of XPath, regular path queries, and nested regular expressions; many of these languages are subsumed by the recursive triple algebra. We also provide examples of the usefulness of TriAL in querying graph, RDF, and social networks data
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