Expansion Trees with Cut

Herbrand's theorem is one of the most fundamental insights in logic. From the syntactic point of view it suggests a compact representation of proofs in classical first- and higher-order logic by recording the information which instances have been chosen for which quantifiers, known in the literature as expansion trees. Such a representation is inherently analytic and hence corresponds to a cut-free sequent calculus proof. Recently several extensions of such proof representations to proofs with cut have been proposed. These extensions are based on graphical formalisms similar to proof nets and are limited to prenex formulas. In this paper we present a new approach that directly extends expansion trees by cuts and covers also non-prenex formulas. We describe a cut-elimination procedure for our expansion trees with cut that is based on the natural reduction steps. We prove that it is weakly normalizing using methods from the epsilon-calculus

On the Herbrand content of LK

We present a structural representation of the Herbrand content of LK-proofs with cuts of complexity prenex Sigma-2/Pi-2. The representation takes the form of a typed non-deterministic tree grammar of order 2 which generates a finite language of first-order terms that appear in the Herbrand expansions obtained through cut-elimination. In particular, for every Gentzen-style reduction between LK-proofs we study the induced grammars and classify the cases in which language equality and inclusion hold.Comment: In Proceedings CL&C 2016, arXiv:1606.0582

Tree Grammars for the Elimination of Non-prenex Cuts

Recently a new connection between proof theory and formal language theory was introduced. It was shown that the operation of cut elimination for proofs with prenex Pi_1-cuts in classical first-order logic corresponds to computing the language of a particular type of tree grammars. The present paper extends this connection to arbitrary (i.e. non-prenex) cuts without quantifier alternations. The key to treating non-prenex cuts lies in using a new class of tree grammars, constraint grammars, which describe the relationship of the applicability of its productions by a propositional formula

The true concurrency of herbrand's theorem

International audienceHerbrand's theorem, widely regarded as a cornerstone of proof theory, exposes some of the constructive content of classical logic. In its simplest form, it reduces the validity of a first-order purely existential formula to that of a finite disjunction. In the general case, it reduces first-order validity to propositional validity, by understanding the structure of the assignment of first-order terms to existential quantifiers, and the causal dependency between quantifiers. In this paper, we show that Herbrand's theorem in its general form can be elegantly stated and proved as a theorem in the framework of concurrent games, a denotational semantics designed to faithfully represent causality and independence in concurrent systems, thereby exposing the concurrency underlying the computational content of classical proofs. The causal structure of concurrent strategies, paired with annotations by first-order terms, is used to specify the dependency between quantifiers implicit in proofs. Furthermore concurrent strategies can be composed, yielding a compositional proof of Herbrand's theorem, simply by interpreting classical sequent proofs in a well-chosen denotational model