Logic Meets Algebra: the Case of Regular Languages

The study of finite automata and regular languages is a privileged meeting point of algebra and logic. Since the work of Buchi, regular languages have been classified according to their descriptive complexity, i.e. the type of logical formalism required to define them. The algebraic point of view on automata is an essential complement of this classification: by providing alternative, algebraic characterizations for the classes, it often yields the only opportunity for the design of algorithms that decide expressibility in some logical fragment. We survey the existing results relating the expressibility of regular languages in logical fragments of MSO[S] with algebraic properties of their minimal automata. In particular, we show that many of the best known results in this area share the same underlying mechanics and rely on a very strong relation between logical substitutions and block-products of pseudovarieties of monoid. We also explain the impact of these connections on circuit complexity theory.Comment: 37 page

The descriptive complexity approach to LOGCFL

Building upon the known generalized-quantifier-based first-order characterization of LOGCFL, we lay the groundwork for a deeper investigation. Specifically, we examine subclasses of LOGCFL arising from varying the arity and nesting of groupoidal quantifiers. Our work extends the elaborate theory relating monoidal quantifiers to NC1 and its subclasses. In the absence of the BIT predicate, we resolve the main issues: we show in particular that no single outermost unary groupoidal quantifier with FO can capture all the context-free languages, and we obtain the surprising result that a variant of Greibach's ``hardest context-free language'' is LOGCFL-complete under quantifier-free BIT-free projections. We then prove that FO with unary groupoidal quantifiers is strictly more expressive with the BIT predicate than without. Considering a particular groupoidal quantifier, we prove that first-order logic with majority of pairs is strictly more expressive than first-order with majority of individuals. As a technical tool of independent interest, we define the notion of an aperiodic nondeterministic finite automaton and prove that FO translations are precisely the mappings computed by single-valued aperiodic nondeterministic finite transducers.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

Two-variable logics with some betweenness relations: Expressiveness, satisfiability and membership

We study two extensions of FO2[<], first-order logic interpreted in finite words, in which formulas are restricted to use only two variables. We adjoin to this language two-variable atomic formulas that say, "the letter $a$ appears between positions $x$ and $y$" and "the factor $u$ appears between positions $x$ and $y$". These are, in a sense, the simplest properties that are not expressible using only two variables. We present several logics, both first-order and temporal, that have the same expressive power, and find matching lower and upper bounds for the complexity of satisfiability for each of these formulations. We give effective conditions, in terms of the syntactic monoid of a regular language, for a property to be expressible in these logics. This algebraic analysis allows us to prove, among other things, that our new logics have strictly less expressive power than full first-order logic FO[<]. Our proofs required the development of novel techniques concerning factorizations of words

Evaluating Datalog via Tree Automata and Cycluits

We investigate parameterizations of both database instances and queries that make query evaluation fixed-parameter tractable in combined complexity. We show that clique-frontier-guarded Datalog with stratified negation (CFG-Datalog) enjoys bilinear-time evaluation on structures of bounded treewidth for programs of bounded rule size. Such programs capture in particular conjunctive queries with simplicial decompositions of bounded width, guarded negation fragment queries of bounded CQ-rank, or two-way regular path queries. Our result is shown by translating to alternating two-way automata, whose semantics is defined via cyclic provenance circuits (cycluits) that can be tractably evaluated.Comment: 56 pages, 63 references. Journal version of "Combined Tractability of Query Evaluation via Tree Automata and Cycluits (Extended Version)" at arXiv:1612.04203. Up to the stylesheet, page/environment numbering, and possible minor publisher-induced changes, this is the exact content of the journal paper that will appear in Theory of Computing Systems. Update wrt version 1: latest reviewer feedbac

Dynamic Complexity of Parity Exists Queries

Given a graph whose nodes may be coloured red, the parity of the number of red nodes can easily be maintained with first-order update rules in the dynamic complexity framework DynFO of Patnaik and Immerman. Can this be generalised to other or even all queries that are definable in first-order logic extended by parity quantifiers? We consider the query that asks whether the number of nodes that have an edge to a red node is odd. Already this simple query of quantifier structure parity-exists is a major roadblock for dynamically capturing extensions of first-order logic. We show that this query cannot be maintained with quantifier-free first-order update rules, and that variants induce a hierarchy for such update rules with respect to the arity of the maintained auxiliary relations. Towards maintaining the query with full first-order update rules, it is shown that degree-restricted variants can be maintained

Minimization for Generalized Boolean Formulas

The minimization problem for propositional formulas is an important optimization problem in the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. In general, the problem is Sigma-2-complete under Turing reductions, but restricted versions are tractable. We study the complexity of minimization for formulas in two established frameworks for restricted propositional logic: The Post framework allowing arbitrarily nested formulas over a set of Boolean connectors, and the constraint setting, allowing generalizations of CNF formulas. In the Post case, we obtain a dichotomy result: Minimization is solvable in polynomial time or coNP-hard. This result also applies to Boolean circuits. For CNF formulas, we obtain new minimization algorithms for a large class of formulas, and give strong evidence that we have covered all polynomial-time cases