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An Integrated First-Order Theory of Points and Intervals over Linear Orders (Part II)
There are two natural and well-studied approaches to temporal ontology and
reasoning: point-based and interval-based. Usually, interval-based temporal
reasoning deals with points as a particular case of duration-less intervals. A
recent result by Balbiani, Goranko, and Sciavicco presented an explicit
two-sorted point-interval temporal framework in which time instants (points)
and time periods (intervals) are considered on a par, allowing the perspective
to shift between these within the formal discourse. We consider here two-sorted
first-order languages based on the same principle, and therefore including
relations, as first studied by Reich, among others, between points, between
intervals, and inter-sort. We give complete classifications of its
sub-languages in terms of relative expressive power, thus determining how many,
and which, are the intrinsically different extensions of two-sorted first-order
logic with one or more such relations. This approach roots out the classical
problem of whether or not points should be included in a interval-based
semantics. In this Part II, we deal with the cases of all dense and the case of
all unbounded linearly ordered sets.Comment: This is Part II of the paper `An Integrated First-Order Theory of
Points and Intervals over Linear Orders' arXiv:1805.08425v2. Therefore the
introduction, preliminaries and conclusions of the two papers are the same.
This version implements a few minor corrections and an update to the
affiliation of the second autho
Adding modular predicates to first-order fragments
We investigate the decidability of the definability problem for fragments of
first order logic over finite words enriched with modular predicates. Our
approach aims toward the most generic statements that we could achieve, which
successfully covers the quantifier alternation hierarchy of first order logic
and some of its fragments. We obtain that deciding this problem for each level
of the alternation hierarchy of both first order logic and its two-variable
fragment when equipped with all regular numerical predicates is not harder than
deciding it for the corresponding level equipped with only the linear order and
the successor. For two-variable fragments we also treat the case of the
signature containing only the order and modular predicates.Relying on some
recent results, this proves the decidability for each level of the alternation
hierarchy of the two-variable first order fragmentwhile in the case of the
first order logic the question remains open for levels greater than two.The
main ingredients of the proofs are syntactic transformations of first order
formulas as well as the algebraic framework of finite categories
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