Guarded Teams: The Horizontally Guarded Case

Team semantics admits reasoning about large sets of data, modelled by sets of assignments (called teams), with first-order syntax. This leads to high expressive power and complexity, particularly in the presence of atomic dependency properties for such data sets. It is therefore interesting to explore fragments and variants of logic with team semantics that permit model-theoretic tools and algorithmic methods to control this explosion in expressive power and complexity. We combine here the study of team semantics with the notion of guarded logics, which are well-understood in the case of classical Tarski semantics, and known to strike a good balance between expressive power and algorithmic manageability. In fact there are two strains of guardedness for teams. Horizontal guardedness requires the individual assignments of the team to be guarded in the usual sense of guarded logics. Vertical guardedness, on the other hand, posits an additional (or definable) hypergraph structure on relational structures in order to interpret a constraint on the component-wise variability of assignments within teams. In this paper we investigate the horizontally guarded case. We study horizontally guarded logics for teams and appropriate notions of guarded team bisimulation. In particular, we establish characterisation theorems that relate invariance under guarded team bisimulation with guarded team logics, but also with logics under classical Tarski semantics

Relating Structure and Power: Comonadic Semantics for Computational Resources

Combinatorial games are widely used in finite model theory, constraint satisfaction, modal logic and concurrency theory to characterize logical equivalences between structures. In particular, Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games, pebble games, and bisimulation games play a central role. We show how each of these types of games can be described in terms of an indexed family of comonads on the category of relational structures and homomorphisms. The index k is a resource parameter which bounds the degree of access to the underlying structure. The coKleisli categories for these comonads can be used to give syntax-free characterizations of a wide range of important logical equivalences. Moreover, the coalgebras for these indexed comonads can be used to characterize key combinatorial parameters: tree-depth for the Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse comonad, tree-width for the pebbling comonad, and synchronization-tree depth for the modal unfolding comonad. These results pave the way for systematic connections between two major branches of the field of logic in computer science which hitherto have been almost disjoint: categorical semantics, and finite and algorithmic model theory.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of Computer Science Logic 201

Logical Separability of Incomplete Data under Ontologies

Finding a logical formula that separates positive and negative examples given in the form of labeled data items is fundamental in applications such as concept learning, reverse engineering of database queries, and generating referring expressions. In this paper, we investigate the existence of a separating formula for incomplete data in the presence of an ontology. Both for the ontology language and the separation language, we concentrate on first-order logic and three important fragments thereof: the description logic $\mathcal{ALCI}$, the guarded fragment, and the two-variable fragment. We consider several forms of separability that differ in the treatment of negative examples and in whether or not they admit the use of additional helper symbols to achieve separation. We characterize separability in a model-theoretic way, compare the separating power of the different languages, and determine the computational complexity of separability as a decision problem

Model Comparison Games for Horn Description Logics

Horn description logics are syntactically defined fragments of standard description logics that fall within the Horn fragment of first-order logic and for which ontology-mediated query answering is in PTIME for data complexity. They were independently introduced in modal logic to capture the intersection of Horn first-order logic with modal logic. In this paper, we introduce model comparison games for the basic Horn description logic hornALC (corresponding to the basic Horn modal logic) and use them to obtain an Ehrenfeucht-Fra ̈ısse ́ type definability result and a van Benthem style expressive completeness result for hornALC. We also establish a finite model theory version of the latter. The Ehrenfeucht-Fra ̈ısse ́ type definability result is used to show that checking hornALC indistinguishability of models is EXPTIME-complete, which is in sharp contrast to ALC indistinguishability (i.e., bisimulation equivalence) checkable in PTIME. In addition, we explore the behavior of Horn fragments of more expressive description and modal logics by defining a Horn guarded fragment of first-order logic and introducing model comparison games for it