A Tree Logic with Graded Paths and Nominals

Regular tree grammars and regular path expressions constitute core constructs widely used in programming languages and type systems. Nevertheless, there has been little research so far on reasoning frameworks for path expressions where node cardinality constraints occur along a path in a tree. We present a logic capable of expressing deep counting along paths which may include arbitrary recursive forward and backward navigation. The counting extensions can be seen as a generalization of graded modalities that count immediate successor nodes. While the combination of graded modalities, nominals, and inverse modalities yields undecidable logics over graphs, we show that these features can be combined in a tree logic decidable in exponential time

One-unambiguity of regular expressions with numeric occurrence indicators

Regular expressions with numeric occurrence indicators are an extension of traditional regular expressions, which let the required minimum and the allowed maximum number of iterations of subexpressions be described with numeric parameters. We consider the problem of testing whether a given regular expression E with numeric occurrence indicators is 1-unambiguous or not. This condition means, informally, that any prefix of any word accepted by expression E determines a unique path of matching symbol positions in E. The main contribution of this paper is a polynomial-time method for solving this problem, and a formal proof of its correctness

Efficient asymmetric inclusion of regular expressions with interleaving and counting for XML type-checking

The inclusion of Regular Expressions (REs) is the kernel of any type-checking algorithm for XML manipulation languages. XML applications would benefit from the extension of REs with interleaving and counting, but this is not feasible in general, since inclusion is EXPSPACE-complete for such extended REs. In Colazzo et al. (2009) [1] we introduced a notion of ?conflict-free REs?, which are extended REs with excellent complexity behaviour, including a polynomial inclusion algorithm [1] and linear membership (Ghelli et al., 2008 [2]). Conflict-free REs have interleaving and counting, but the complexity is tamed by the ?conflict-free? limitations, which have been found to be satisfied by the vast majority of the content models published on the Web.However, a type-checking algorithm needs to compare machine-generated subtypes against human-defined supertypes. The conflict-free restriction, while quite harmless for the human-defined supertype, is far too restrictive for the subtype. We show here that the PTIME inclusion algorithm can be actually extended to deal with totally unrestricted REs with counting and interleaving in the subtype position, provided that the supertype is conflict-free.This is exactly the expressive power that we need in order to use subtyping inside type-checking algorithms, and the cost of this generalized algorithm is only quadratic, which is as good as the best algorithm we have for the symmetric case (see [1]). The result is extremely surprising, since we had previously found that symmetric inclusion becomes NP-hard as soon as the candidate subtype is enriched with binary intersection, a generalization that looked much more innocent than what we achieve here