Extensional and Intensional Strategies

This paper is a contribution to the theoretical foundations of strategies. We first present a general definition of abstract strategies which is extensional in the sense that a strategy is defined explicitly as a set of derivations of an abstract reduction system. We then move to a more intensional definition supporting the abstract view but more operational in the sense that it describes a means for determining such a set. We characterize the class of extensional strategies that can be defined intensionally. We also give some hints towards a logical characterization of intensional strategies and propose a few challenging perspectives

Intensional Models for the Theory of Types

In this paper we define intensional models for the classical theory of types, thus arriving at an intensional type logic ITL. Intensional models generalize Henkin's general models and have a natural definition. As a class they do not validate the axiom of Extensionality. We give a cut-free sequent calculus for type theory and show completeness of this calculus with respect to the class of intensional models via a model existence theorem. After this we turn our attention to applications. Firstly, it is argued that, since ITL is truly intensional, it can be used to model ascriptions of propositional attitude without predicting logical omniscience. In order to illustrate this a small fragment of English is defined and provided with an ITL semantics. Secondly, it is shown that ITL models contain certain objects that can be identified with possible worlds. Essential elements of modal logic become available within classical type theory once the axiom of Extensionality is given up.Comment: 25 page

An extensional Kleene realizability semantics for the Minimalist Foundation

We build a Kleene realizability semantics for the two-level Minimalist Foundation MF, ideated by Maietti and Sambin in 2005 and completed by Maietti in 2009. Thanks to this semantics we prove that both levels of MF are consistent with the (Extended) formal Church Thesis CT. MF consists of two levels, an intensional one, called mTT and an extensional one, called emTT, based on versions of Martin-L\"of's type theory. Thanks to the link between the two levels, it is enough to build a semantics for the intensional level to get one also for the extensional level. Hence here we just build a realizability semantics for the intensional level mTT. Such a semantics is a modification of the realizability semantics in Beeson 1985 for extensional first order Martin-L\"of's type theory with one universe. So it is formalised in Feferman's classical arithmetic theory of inductive definitions. It is called extensional Kleene realizability semantics since it validates extensional equality of type-theoretic functions extFun, as in Beeson 1985. The main modification we perform on Beeson's semantics is to interpret propositions, which are defined primitively in MF, in a proof-irrelevant way. As a consequence, we gain the validity of CT. Recalling that extFun+ CT+ AC are inconsistent over arithmetics with finite types, we conclude that our semantics does not validate the full Axiom of Choice AC. On the contrary, Beeson's semantics does validate AC, being this a theorem of Martin-L\"of's theory, but it does not validate CT. The semantics we present here appears to be the best Kleene realizability semantics for the extensional level emTT of MF. Indeed Beeson's semantics is not an option for emTT since the full AC added to it entails the excluded middle

A general theory of action languages

We present a general theory of action-based languages as a paradigm, for the description, of those computational systems which include elements of concurrency and networking, and extend this approach to describe dist.ributed systems and also t,o describe the interaction of a system, with an environment. As part of this approach we introduce the Action Language as a common model for the class of nondeterministic concurrent programming languages and define its intensional and interaction semantics in terrors of continuous transformation of environment behavior. This semantics i.s specialized for programs with stores, and extended to describe distributed computations

Expressive Stream Reasoning with Laser

An increasing number of use cases require a timely extraction of non-trivial knowledge from semantically annotated data streams, especially on the Web and for the Internet of Things (IoT). Often, this extraction requires expressive reasoning, which is challenging to compute on large streams. We propose Laser, a new reasoner that supports a pragmatic, non-trivial fragment of the logic LARS which extends Answer Set Programming (ASP) for streams. At its core, Laser implements a novel evaluation procedure which annotates formulae to avoid the re-computation of duplicates at multiple time points. This procedure, combined with a judicious implementation of the LARS operators, is responsible for significantly better runtimes than the ones of other state-of-the-art systems like C-SPARQL and CQELS, or an implementation of LARS which runs on the ASP solver Clingo. This enables the application of expressive logic-based reasoning to large streams and opens the door to a wider range of stream reasoning use cases.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. Extended version of accepted paper at ISWC 201

Elementary quotient completion

We extend the notion of exact completion on a weakly lex category to elementary doctrines. We show how any such doctrine admits an elementary quotient completion, which freely adds effective quotients and extensional equality. We note that the elementary quotient completion can be obtained as the composite of two free constructions: one adds effective quotients, and the other forces extensionality of maps. We also prove that each construction preserves comprehensions

A Lambda Term Representation Inspired by Linear Ordered Logic

We introduce a new nameless representation of lambda terms inspired by ordered logic. At a lambda abstraction, number and relative position of all occurrences of the bound variable are stored, and application carries the additional information where to cut the variable context into function and argument part. This way, complete information about free variable occurrence is available at each subterm without requiring a traversal, and environments can be kept exact such that they only assign values to variables that actually occur in the associated term. Our approach avoids space leaks in interpreters that build function closures. In this article, we prove correctness of the new representation and present an experimental evaluation of its performance in a proof checker for the Edinburgh Logical Framework. Keywords: representation of binders, explicit substitutions, ordered contexts, space leaks, Logical Framework.Comment: In Proceedings LFMTP 2011, arXiv:1110.668

Quotient completion for the foundation of constructive mathematics

We apply some tools developed in categorical logic to give an abstract description of constructions used to formalize constructive mathematics in foundations based on intensional type theory. The key concept we employ is that of a Lawvere hyperdoctrine for which we describe a notion of quotient completion. That notion includes the exact completion on a category with weak finite limits as an instance as well as examples from type theory that fall apart from this.Comment: 32 page