593 research outputs found
Weak MSO: Automata and Expressiveness Modulo Bisimilarity
We prove that the bisimulation-invariant fragment of weak monadic
second-order logic (WMSO) is equivalent to the fragment of the modal
-calculus where the application of the least fixpoint operator is restricted to formulas that are continuous in . Our
proof is automata-theoretic in nature; in particular, we introduce a class of
automata characterizing the expressive power of WMSO over tree models of
arbitrary branching degree. The transition map of these automata is defined in
terms of a logic that is the extension of first-order
logic with a generalized quantifier , where means that there are infinitely many objects satisfying . An
important part of our work consists of a model-theoretic analysis of
.Comment: Technical Report, 57 page
On Descriptive Complexity, Language Complexity, and GB
We introduce , a monadic second-order language for reasoning about
trees which characterizes the strongly Context-Free Languages in the sense that
a set of finite trees is definable in iff it is (modulo a
projection) a Local Set---the set of derivation trees generated by a CFG. This
provides a flexible approach to establishing language-theoretic complexity
results for formalisms that are based on systems of well-formedness constraints
on trees. We demonstrate this technique by sketching two such results for
Government and Binding Theory. First, we show that {\em free-indexation\/}, the
mechanism assumed to mediate a variety of agreement and binding relationships
in GB, is not definable in and therefore not enforcible by CFGs.
Second, we show how, in spite of this limitation, a reasonably complete GB
account of English can be defined in . Consequently, the language
licensed by that account is strongly context-free. We illustrate some of the
issues involved in establishing this result by looking at the definition, in
, of chains. The limitations of this definition provide some insight
into the types of natural linguistic principles that correspond to higher
levels of language complexity. We close with some speculation on the possible
significance of these results for generative linguistics.Comment: To appear in Specifying Syntactic Structures, papers from the Logic,
Structures, and Syntax workshop, Amsterdam, Sept. 1994. LaTeX source with
nine included postscript figure
Logics for Unranked Trees: An Overview
Labeled unranked trees are used as a model of XML documents, and logical
languages for them have been studied actively over the past several years. Such
logics have different purposes: some are better suited for extracting data,
some for expressing navigational properties, and some make it easy to relate
complex properties of trees to the existence of tree automata for those
properties. Furthermore, logics differ significantly in their model-checking
properties, their automata models, and their behavior on ordered and unordered
trees. In this paper we present a survey of logics for unranked trees
Transforming structures by set interpretations
We consider a new kind of interpretation over relational structures: finite
sets interpretations. Those interpretations are defined by weak monadic
second-order (WMSO) formulas with free set variables. They transform a given
structure into a structure with a domain consisting of finite sets of elements
of the orignal structure. The definition of these interpretations directly
implies that they send structures with a decidable WMSO theory to structures
with a decidable first-order theory. In this paper, we investigate the
expressive power of such interpretations applied to infinite deterministic
trees. The results can be used in the study of automatic and tree-automatic
structures.Comment: 36 page
Definability Equals Recognizability for -Outerplanar Graphs
One of the most famous algorithmic meta-theorems states that every graph
property that can be defined by a sentence in counting monadic second order
logic (CMSOL) can be checked in linear time for graphs of bounded treewidth,
which is known as Courcelle's Theorem. These algorithms are constructed as
finite state tree automata, and hence every CMSOL-definable graph property is
recognizable. Courcelle also conjectured that the converse holds, i.e. every
recognizable graph property is definable in CMSOL for graphs of bounded
treewidth. We prove this conjecture for -outerplanar graphs, which are known
to have treewidth at most .Comment: 40 pages, 8 figure
Decidability Results for the Boundedness Problem
We prove decidability of the boundedness problem for monadic least
fixed-point recursion based on positive monadic second-order (MSO) formulae
over trees. Given an MSO-formula phi(X,x) that is positive in X, it is
decidable whether the fixed-point recursion based on phi is spurious over the
class of all trees in the sense that there is some uniform finite bound for the
number of iterations phi takes to reach its least fixed point, uniformly across
all trees. We also identify the exact complexity of this problem. The proof
uses automata-theoretic techniques. This key result extends, by means of
model-theoretic interpretations, to show decidability of the boundedness
problem for MSO and guarded second-order logic (GSO) over the classes of
structures of fixed finite tree-width. Further model-theoretic transfer
arguments allow us to derive major known decidability results for boundedness
for fragments of first-order logic as well as new ones
An expressive completeness theorem for coalgebraic modal mu-calculi
Generalizing standard monadic second-order logic for Kripke models, we
introduce monadic second-order logic interpreted over coalgebras for an
arbitrary set functor. We then consider invariance under behavioral equivalence
of MSO-formulas. More specifically, we investigate whether the coalgebraic
mu-calculus is the bisimulation-invariant fragment of the monadic second-order
language for a given functor. Using automatatheoretic techniques and building
on recent results by the third author, we show that in order to provide such a
characterization result it suffices to find what we call an adequate uniform
construction for the coalgebraic type functor. As direct applications of this
result we obtain a partly new proof of the Janin-Walukiewicz Theorem for the
modal mu-calculus, avoiding the use of syntactic normal forms, and bisimulation
invariance results for the bag functor (graded modal logic) and all exponential
polynomial functors (including the "game functor"). As a more involved
application, involving additional non-trivial ideas, we also derive a
characterization theorem for the monotone modal mu-calculus, with respect to a
natural monadic second-order language for monotone neighborhood models.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1501.0721
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