Complete Sets of Reductions Modulo A Class of Equational Theories which Generate Infinite Congruence Classes

In this paper we present a generalization of the Knuth-Bendix procedure for generating a complete set of reductions modulo an equational theory. Previous such completion procedures have been restricted to equational theories which generate finite congruence classes. The distinguishing feature of this work is that we are able to generate complete sets of reductions for some equational theories which generate infinite congruence classes. In particular, we are able to handle the class of equational theories which contain the associative, commutative, and identity laws for one or more operators. We first generalize the notion of rewriting modulo an equational theory to include a special form of conditional reduction. We are able to show that this conditional rewriting relation restores the finite termination property which is often lost when rewriting in the presence of infinite congruence classes. We then develop Church-Rosser tests based on the conditional rewriting relation and set forth a completion procedure incorporating these tests. Finally, we describe a computer program which implements the theory and give the results of several experiments using the program

A Homotopical Completion Procedure with Applications to Coherence of Monoids

International audienceOne of the most used algorithm in rewriting theory is the Knuth-Bendix completion procedure which starts from a terminating rewriting system and iteratively adds rules to it, trying to produce an equivalent convergent rewriting system. It is in particular used to study presentations of monoids, since normal forms of the rewriting system provide canonical representatives of words modulo the congruence generated by the rules. Here, we are interested in extending this procedure in order to retrieve information about the low-dimensional homotopy properties of a monoid. We therefore consider the notion of coherent presentation, which is a generalization of rewriting systems that keeps track of the cells generated by confluence diagrams. We extend the Knuth-Bendix completion procedure to this setting, resulting in a homotopical completion procedure. It is based on a generalization of Tietze transformations, which are operations that can be iteratively applied to relate any two presentations of the same monoid. We also explain how these transformations can be used to remove useless generators, rules, or confluence diagrams in a coherent presentation, thus leading to a homotopical reduction procedure. Finally, we apply these techniques to the study of some examples coming from representation theory, to compute minimal coherent presentations for them: braid, plactic and Chinese monoids

Canonized Rewriting and Ground AC Completion Modulo Shostak Theories : Design and Implementation

AC-completion efficiently handles equality modulo associative and commutative function symbols. When the input is ground, the procedure terminates and provides a decision algorithm for the word problem. In this paper, we present a modular extension of ground AC-completion for deciding formulas in the combination of the theory of equality with user-defined AC symbols, uninterpreted symbols and an arbitrary signature disjoint Shostak theory X. Our algorithm, called AC(X), is obtained by augmenting in a modular way ground AC-completion with the canonizer and solver present for the theory X. This integration rests on canonized rewriting, a new relation reminiscent to normalized rewriting, which integrates canonizers in rewriting steps. AC(X) is proved sound, complete and terminating, and is implemented to extend the core of the Alt-Ergo theorem prover.Comment: 30 pages, full version of the paper TACAS'11 paper "Canonized Rewriting and Ground AC-Completion Modulo Shostak Theories" accepted for publication by LMCS (Logical Methods in Computer Science

The Tutte-Grothendieck group of a convergent alphabetic rewriting system

The two operations, deletion and contraction of an edge, on multigraphs directly lead to the Tutte polynomial which satisfies a universal problem. As observed by Brylawski in terms of order relations, these operations may be interpreted as a particular instance of a general theory which involves universal invariants like the Tutte polynomial, and a universal group, called the Tutte-Grothendieck group. In this contribution, Brylawski's theory is extended in two ways: first of all, the order relation is replaced by a string rewriting system, and secondly, commutativity by partial commutations (that permits a kind of interpolation between non commutativity and full commutativity). This allows us to clarify the relations between the semigroup subject to rewriting and the Tutte-Grothendieck group: the later is actually the Grothendieck group completion of the former, up to the free adjunction of a unit (this was even not mention by Brylawski), and normal forms may be seen as universal invariants. Moreover we prove that such universal constructions are also possible in case of a non convergent rewriting system, outside the scope of Brylawski's work.Comment: 17 page

Conservativity of embeddings in the lambda Pi calculus modulo rewriting (long version)

The lambda Pi calculus can be extended with rewrite rules to embed any functional pure type system. In this paper, we show that the embedding is conservative by proving a relative form of normalization, thus justifying the use of the lambda Pi calculus modulo rewriting as a logical framework for logics based on pure type systems. This result was previously only proved under the condition that the target system is normalizing. Our approach does not depend on this condition and therefore also works when the source system is not normalizing.Comment: Long version of TLCA 2015 pape

Deduction modulo theory

This paper is a survey on Deduction modulo theor

Semantic A-translation and Super-consistency entail Classical Cut Elimination

We show that if a theory R defined by a rewrite system is super-consistent, the classical sequent calculus modulo R enjoys the cut elimination property, which was an open question. For such theories it was already known that proofs strongly normalize in natural deduction modulo R, and that cut elimination holds in the intuitionistic sequent calculus modulo R. We first define a syntactic and a semantic version of Friedman's A-translation, showing that it preserves the structure of pseudo-Heyting algebra, our semantic framework. Then we relate the interpretation of a theory in the A-translated algebra and its A-translation in the original algebra. This allows to show the stability of the super-consistency criterion and the cut elimination theorem

New results on rewrite-based satisfiability procedures

Program analysis and verification require decision procedures to reason on theories of data structures. Many problems can be reduced to the satisfiability of sets of ground literals in theory T. If a sound and complete inference system for first-order logic is guaranteed to terminate on T-satisfiability problems, any theorem-proving strategy with that system and a fair search plan is a T-satisfiability procedure. We prove termination of a rewrite-based first-order engine on the theories of records, integer offsets, integer offsets modulo and lists. We give a modularity theorem stating sufficient conditions for termination on a combinations of theories, given termination on each. The above theories, as well as others, satisfy these conditions. We introduce several sets of benchmarks on these theories and their combinations, including both parametric synthetic benchmarks to test scalability, and real-world problems to test performances on huge sets of literals. We compare the rewrite-based theorem prover E with the validity checkers CVC and CVC Lite. Contrary to the folklore that a general-purpose prover cannot compete with reasoners with built-in theories, the experiments are overall favorable to the theorem prover, showing that not only the rewriting approach is elegant and conceptually simple, but has important practical implications.Comment: To appear in the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 49 page

Coherent Presentations of Monoidal Categories

Presentations of categories are a well-known algebraic tool to provide descriptions of categories by means of generators, for objects and morphisms, and relations on morphisms. We generalize here this notion, in order to consider situations where the objects are considered modulo an equivalence relation, which is described by equational generators. When those form a convergent (abstract) rewriting system on objects, there are three very natural constructions that can be used to define the category which is described by the presentation: one consists in turning equational generators into identities (i.e. considering a quotient category), one consists in formally adding inverses to equational generators (i.e. localizing the category), and one consists in restricting to objects which are normal forms. We show that, under suitable coherence conditions on the presentation, the three constructions coincide, thus generalizing celebrated results on presentations of groups, and we extend those conditions to presentations of monoidal categories

Quantifier-Free Interpolation of a Theory of Arrays

The use of interpolants in model checking is becoming an enabling technology to allow fast and robust verification of hardware and software. The application of encodings based on the theory of arrays, however, is limited by the impossibility of deriving quantifier- free interpolants in general. In this paper, we show that it is possible to obtain quantifier-free interpolants for a Skolemized version of the extensional theory of arrays. We prove this in two ways: (1) non-constructively, by using the model theoretic notion of amalgamation, which is known to be equivalent to admit quantifier-free interpolation for universal theories; and (2) constructively, by designing an interpolating procedure, based on solving equations between array updates. (Interestingly, rewriting techniques are used in the key steps of the solver and its proof of correctness.) To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful attempt of computing quantifier- free interpolants for a variant of the theory of arrays with extensionality