Herbrand-Confluence for Cut Elimination in Classical First Order Logic

We consider cut-elimination in the sequent calculus for classical first-order logic. It is well known that this system, in its most general form, is neither confluent nor strongly normalizing. In this work we take a coarser (and mathematically more realistic) look at cut-free proofs. We analyze which witnesses they choose for which quantifiers, or in other words: we only consider the Herbrand-disjunction of a cut-free proof. Our main theorem is a confluence result for a natural class of proofs: all (possibly infinitely many) normal forms of the non-erasing reduction lead to the same Herbrand-disjunction

Herbrand-Confluence for Cut Elimination in Classical First Order Logic

International audienceWe consider cut-elimination in the sequent calculus for classical first-order logic. It is well known that this system, in its most general form, is neither confluent nor strongly normalizing. In this work we take a coarser (and mathematically more realistic) look at cut-free proofs. We analyze which witnesses they choose for which quantifiers, or in other words: we only consider the Herbrand-disjunction of a cut-free proof. Our main theorem is a confluence result for a natural class of proofs: all (possibly infinitely many) normal forms of the non-erasing reduction lead to the same Herbrand-disjunction

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

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

Project Presentation: Algorithmic Structuring and Compression of Proofs (ASCOP)

International audienceComputer-generated proofs are typically analytic, i.e. they essentially consist only of formulas which are present in the theorem that is shown. In contrast, mathematical proofs written by humans almost never are: they are highly structured due to the use of lemmas. The ASCOP-project aims at developing algorithms and software which structure and abbreviate analytic proofs by computing useful lemmas. These algorithms will be based on recent groundbreaking results establishing a new connection between proof theory and formal language theory. This connection allows the application of e cient algorithms based on formal grammars to structure and compress proofs

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

Project Presentation: Algorithmic Structuring and Compression of Proofs (ASCOP)

International audienceComputer-generated proofs are typically analytic, i.e. they essentially consist only of formulas which are present in the theorem that is shown. In contrast, mathematical proofs written by humans almost never are: they are highly structured due to the use of lemmas. The ASCOP-project aims at developing algorithms and software which structure and abbreviate analytic proofs by computing useful lemmas. These algorithms will be based on recent groundbreaking results establishing a new connection between proof theory and formal language theory. This connection allows the application of e cient algorithms based on formal grammars to structure and compress proofs