799 research outputs found
Order Invariance on Decomposable Structures
Order-invariant formulas access an ordering on a structure's universe, but
the model relation is independent of the used ordering. Order invariance is
frequently used for logic-based approaches in computer science. Order-invariant
formulas capture unordered problems of complexity classes and they model the
independence of the answer to a database query from low-level aspects of
databases. We study the expressive power of order-invariant monadic
second-order (MSO) and first-order (FO) logic on restricted classes of
structures that admit certain forms of tree decompositions (not necessarily of
bounded width).
While order-invariant MSO is more expressive than MSO and, even, CMSO (MSO
with modulo-counting predicates), we show that order-invariant MSO and CMSO are
equally expressive on graphs of bounded tree width and on planar graphs. This
extends an earlier result for trees due to Courcelle. Moreover, we show that
all properties definable in order-invariant FO are also definable in MSO on
these classes. These results are applications of a theorem that shows how to
lift up definability results for order-invariant logics from the bags of a
graph's tree decomposition to the graph itself.Comment: Accepted for LICS 201
Weighted Automata and Monadic Second Order Logic
Let S be a commutative semiring. M. Droste and P. Gastin have introduced in
2005 weighted monadic second order logic WMSOL with weights in S. They use a
syntactic fragment RMSOL of WMSOL to characterize word functions (power series)
recognizable by weighted automata, where the semantics of quantifiers is used
both as arithmetical operations and, in the boolean case, as quantification.
Already in 2001, B. Courcelle, J.Makowsky and U. Rotics have introduced a
formalism for graph parameters definable in Monadic Second order Logic, here
called MSOLEVAL with values in a ring R. Their framework can be easily adapted
to semirings S. This formalism clearly separates the logical part from the
arithmetical part and also applies to word functions.
In this paper we give two proofs that RMSOL and MSOLEVAL with values in S
have the same expressive power over words. One proof shows directly that
MSOLEVAL captures the functions recognizable by weighted automata. The other
proof shows how to translate the formalisms from one into the other.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416
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