322 research outputs found
Computing Possible and Certain Answers over Order-Incomplete Data
This paper studies the complexity of query evaluation for databases whose
relations are partially ordered; the problem commonly arises when combining or
transforming ordered data from multiple sources. We focus on queries in a
useful fragment of SQL, namely positive relational algebra with aggregates,
whose bag semantics we extend to the partially ordered setting. Our semantics
leads to the study of two main computational problems: the possibility and
certainty of query answers. We show that these problems are respectively
NP-complete and coNP-complete, but identify tractable cases depending on the
query operators or input partial orders. We further introduce a duplicate
elimination operator and study its effect on the complexity results.Comment: 55 pages, 56 references. Extended journal version of
arXiv:1707.07222. Up to the stylesheet, page/environment numbering, and
possible minor publisher-induced changes, this is the exact content of the
journal paper that will appear in Theoretical Computer Scienc
Static Analysis of Deterministic Negotiations
Negotiation diagrams are a model of concurrent computation akin to workflow
Petri nets. Deterministic negotiation diagrams, equivalent to the much studied
and used free-choice workflow Petri nets, are surprisingly amenable to
verification. Soundness (a property close to deadlock-freedom) can be decided
in PTIME. Further, other fundamental questions like computing summaries or the
expected cost, can also be solved in PTIME for sound deterministic negotiation
diagrams, while they are PSPACE-complete in the general case.
In this paper we generalize and explain these results. We extend the
classical "meet-over-all-paths" (MOP) formulation of static analysis problems
to our concurrent setting, and introduce Mazurkiewicz-invariant analysis
problems, which encompass the questions above and new ones. We show that any
Mazurkiewicz-invariant analysis problem can be solved in PTIME for sound
deterministic negotiations whenever it is in PTIME for sequential
flow-graphs---even though the flow-graph of a deterministic negotiation diagram
can be exponentially larger than the diagram itself. This gives a common
explanation to the low-complexity of all the analysis questions studied so far.
Finally, we show that classical gen/kill analyses are also an instance of our
framework, and obtain a PTIME algorithm for detecting anti-patterns in
free-choice workflow Petri nets.
Our result is based on a novel decomposition theorem, of independent
interest, showing that sound deterministic negotiation diagrams can be
hierarchically decomposed into (possibly overlapping) smaller sound diagrams.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of LICS 2017, IEEE Computer Societ
Querying the Guarded Fragment
Evaluating a Boolean conjunctive query Q against a guarded first-order theory
F is equivalent to checking whether "F and not Q" is unsatisfiable. This
problem is relevant to the areas of database theory and description logic.
Since Q may not be guarded, well known results about the decidability,
complexity, and finite-model property of the guarded fragment do not obviously
carry over to conjunctive query answering over guarded theories, and had been
left open in general. By investigating finite guarded bisimilar covers of
hypergraphs and relational structures, and by substantially generalising
Rosati's finite chase, we prove for guarded theories F and (unions of)
conjunctive queries Q that (i) Q is true in each model of F iff Q is true in
each finite model of F and (ii) determining whether F implies Q is
2EXPTIME-complete. We further show the following results: (iii) the existence
of polynomial-size conformal covers of arbitrary hypergraphs; (iv) a new proof
of the finite model property of the clique-guarded fragment; (v) the small
model property of the guarded fragment with optimal bounds; (vi) a
polynomial-time solution to the canonisation problem modulo guarded
bisimulation, which yields (vii) a capturing result for guarded bisimulation
invariant PTIME.Comment: This is an improved and extended version of the paper of the same
title presented at LICS 201
Rewrite based Verification of XML Updates
We consider problems of access control for update of XML documents. In the
context of XML programming, types can be viewed as hedge automata, and static
type checking amounts to verify that a program always converts valid source
documents into also valid output documents. Given a set of update operations we
are particularly interested by checking safety properties such as preservation
of document types along any sequence of updates. We are also interested by the
related policy consistency problem, that is detecting whether a sequence of
authorized operations can simulate a forbidden one. We reduce these questions
to type checking problems, solved by computing variants of hedge automata
characterizing the set of ancestors and descendants of the initial document
type for the closure of parameterized rewrite rules
When Can We Answer Queries Using Result-Bounded Data Interfaces?
We consider answering queries where the underlying data is available only
over limited interfaces which provide lookup access to the tuples matching a
given binding, but possibly restricting the number of output tuples returned.
Interfaces imposing such "result bounds" are common in accessing data via the
web. Given a query over a set of relations as well as some integrity
constraints that relate the queried relations to the data sources, we examine
the problem of deciding if the query is answerable over the interfaces; that
is, whether there exists a plan that returns all answers to the query, assuming
the source data satisfies the integrity constraints.
The first component of our analysis of answerability is a reduction to a
query containment problem with constraints. The second component is a set of
"schema simplification" theorems capturing limitations on how interfaces with
result bounds can be useful to obtain complete answers to queries. These
results also help to show decidability for the containment problem that
captures answerability, for many classes of constraints. The final component in
our analysis of answerability is a "linearization" method, showing that query
containment with certain guarded dependencies -- including those that emerge
from answerability problems -- can be reduced to query containment for a
well-behaved class of linear dependencies. Putting these components together,
we get a detailed picture of how to check answerability over result-bounded
services.Comment: 45 pages, 2 tables, 43 references. Complete version with proofs of
the PODS'18 paper. The main text of this paper is almost identical to the
PODS'18 except that we have fixed some small mistakes. Relative to the
earlier arXiv version, many errors were corrected, and some terminology has
change
Worst-case Optimal Query Answering for Greedy Sets of Existential Rules and Their Subclasses
The need for an ontological layer on top of data, associated with advanced
reasoning mechanisms able to exploit the semantics encoded in ontologies, has
been acknowledged both in the database and knowledge representation
communities. We focus in this paper on the ontological query answering problem,
which consists of querying data while taking ontological knowledge into
account. More specifically, we establish complexities of the conjunctive query
entailment problem for classes of existential rules (also called
tuple-generating dependencies, Datalog+/- rules, or forall-exists-rules. Our
contribution is twofold. First, we introduce the class of greedy
bounded-treewidth sets (gbts) of rules, which covers guarded rules, and their
most well-known generalizations. We provide a generic algorithm for query
entailment under gbts, which is worst-case optimal for combined complexity with
or without bounded predicate arity, as well as for data complexity and query
complexity. Secondly, we classify several gbts classes, whose complexity was
unknown, with respect to combined complexity (with both unbounded and bounded
predicate arity) and data complexity to obtain a comprehensive picture of the
complexity of existential rule fragments that are based on diverse guardedness
notions. Upper bounds are provided by showing that the proposed algorithm is
optimal for all of them
Rewrite Closure and CF Hedge Automata
We introduce an extension of hedge automata called bidimensional context-free
hedge automata. The class of unranked ordered tree languages they recognize is
shown to be preserved by rewrite closure with inverse-monadic rules. We also
extend the parameterized rewriting rules used for modeling the W3C XQuery
Update Facility in previous works, by the possibility to insert a new parent
node above a given node. We show that the rewrite closure of hedge automata
languages with these extended rewriting systems are context-free hedge
languages
Tractability and the computational mind
We overview logical and computational explanations of the notion of tractability as applied in cognitive science. We start by introducing the basics of mathematical theories of complexity: computability theory, computational complexity theory, and descriptive complexity theory. Computational philosophy of mind often identifies mental algorithms with computable functions. However, with the development of programming practice it has become apparent that for some computable problems finding effective algorithms is hardly possible. Some problems need too much computational resource, e.g., time or memory, to be practically computable.
Computational complexity theory is concerned with the amount of resources required for the execution of algorithms and, hence, the inherent difficulty of computational problems. An important goal of computational complexity theory is to categorize computational problems via complexity classes, and in particular, to identify efficiently solvable problems and draw a line between tractability and intractability.
We survey how complexity can be used to study computational plausibility of cognitive theories. We especially emphasize methodological and mathematical assumptions behind applying complexity theory in cognitive science. We pay special attention to the examples of applying logical and computational complexity toolbox in different domains of cognitive science. We focus mostly on theoretical and experimental research in psycholinguistics and social cognition
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