Collapsible Pushdown Parity Games

International audienceThis paper studies a large class of two-player perfect-information turn-based parity games on infinite graphs, namely those generated by collapsible pushdown automata. The main motivation for studying these games comes from the connections from collapsible pushdown automata and higher-order recursion schemes, both models being equi-expressive for generating infinite trees. Our main result is to establish the decidability of such games and to provide an effective representation of the winning region as well as of a winning strategy. Thus, the results obtained here provide all necessary tools for an in-depth study of logical properties of trees generated by collapsible pushdown automata/recursion schemes

Playing with Trees and Logic

This document proposes an overview of my research sinc

The IO and OI hierarchies revisited

International audienceWe study languages of lambda-terms generated by IO and OI unsafe grammars. These languages can be used to model meaning representations in the formal semantics of natural languages following the tradition of Montague. Using techniques pertaining to the denotational semantics of the simply typed lambda-calculus, we show that the emptiness and membership problems for both types of grammars are decidable. In the course of the proof of the decidability results for OI, we identify a decidable variant of the lambda-definability problem, and prove a stronger form of Statman's finite completeness Theorem

The IO and OI hierarchies revisited

International audienceWe study languages of λ-terms generated by IO and OI unsafe grammars. These languages can be used to model meaning representations in the formal semantics of natural languages following the tradition of Montague [25]. Using techniques pertaining to the denotational semantics of the simply typed λ-calculus, we show that the emptiness and membership problems for both types of grammars are decidable. In the course of the proof of the decidability results for OI, we identify a decidable variant of the λ-definability problem, and prove a stronger form of Statman's finite completeness Theorem [35]

The Limits of Decidability for First Order Logic on CPDA Graphs

Higher-order pushdown automata (n-PDA) are abstract machines equipped with a nested ‘stack of stacks of stacks’. Collapsible pushdown automata (n-CPDA) extend these devices by adding ‘links ’ to the stack and are equi-expressive for tree generation with simply typed λY terms. Whilst the configuration graphs of HOPDA are well understood, relatively little is known about the CPDA graphs. The order-2 CPDA graphs already have undecidable MSO theories but it was only recently shown by Kartzow [9] that first-order logic is decidable at the second level. In this paper we show the surprising result that first-order logic ceases to be decidable at order-3 and above. We delimit the fragments of the decision problem to which our undecidability result applies in terms of quantifer alternation and the orders of CPDA links used. Additionally we exhibit a natural sub-hierarchy enjoying limited decidability