7,690 research outputs found
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
Inquisitive bisimulation
Inquisitive modal logic InqML is a generalisation of standard Kripke-style
modal logic. In its epistemic incarnation, it extends standard epistemic logic
to capture not just the information that agents have, but also the questions
that they are interested in. Technically, InqML fits within the family of
logics based on team semantics. From a model-theoretic perspective, it takes us
a step in the direction of monadic second-order logic, as inquisitive modal
operators involve quantification over sets of worlds. We introduce and
investigate the natural notion of bisimulation equivalence in the setting of
InqML. We compare the expressiveness of InqML and first-order logic in the
context of relational structures with two sorts, one for worlds and one for
information states. We characterise inquisitive modal logic, as well as its
multi-agent epistemic S5-like variant, as the bisimulation invariant fragment
of first-order logic over various natural classes of two-sorted structures.
These results crucially require non-classical methods in studying bisimulation
and first-order expressiveness over non-elementary classes of structures,
irrespective of whether we aim for characterisations in the sense of classical
or of finite model theory
Bisimulation in Inquisitive Modal Logic
Inquisitive modal logic, InqML, is a generalisation of standard Kripke-style
modal logic. In its epistemic incarnation, it extends standard epistemic logic
to capture not just the information that agents have, but also the questions
that they are interested in. Technically, InqML fits within the family of
logics based on team semantics. From a model-theoretic perspective, it takes us
a step in the direction of monadic second-order logic, as inquisitive modal
operators involve quantification over sets of worlds. We introduce and
investigate the natural notion of bisimulation equivalence in the setting of
InqML. We compare the expressiveness of InqML and first-order logic, and
characterise inquisitive modal logic as the bisimulation invariant fragments of
first-order logic over various classes of two-sorted relational structures.
These results crucially require non-classical methods in studying bisimulations
and first-order expressiveness over non-elementary classes.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2017, arXiv:1707.0825
Querying the Guarded Fragment
Evaluating a Boolean conjunctive query Q against a guarded first-order theory
F is equivalent to checking whether "F and not Q" is unsatisfiable. This
problem is relevant to the areas of database theory and description logic.
Since Q may not be guarded, well known results about the decidability,
complexity, and finite-model property of the guarded fragment do not obviously
carry over to conjunctive query answering over guarded theories, and had been
left open in general. By investigating finite guarded bisimilar covers of
hypergraphs and relational structures, and by substantially generalising
Rosati's finite chase, we prove for guarded theories F and (unions of)
conjunctive queries Q that (i) Q is true in each model of F iff Q is true in
each finite model of F and (ii) determining whether F implies Q is
2EXPTIME-complete. We further show the following results: (iii) the existence
of polynomial-size conformal covers of arbitrary hypergraphs; (iv) a new proof
of the finite model property of the clique-guarded fragment; (v) the small
model property of the guarded fragment with optimal bounds; (vi) a
polynomial-time solution to the canonisation problem modulo guarded
bisimulation, which yields (vii) a capturing result for guarded bisimulation
invariant PTIME.Comment: This is an improved and extended version of the paper of the same
title presented at LICS 201
Decidability Results for the Boundedness Problem
We prove decidability of the boundedness problem for monadic least
fixed-point recursion based on positive monadic second-order (MSO) formulae
over trees. Given an MSO-formula phi(X,x) that is positive in X, it is
decidable whether the fixed-point recursion based on phi is spurious over the
class of all trees in the sense that there is some uniform finite bound for the
number of iterations phi takes to reach its least fixed point, uniformly across
all trees. We also identify the exact complexity of this problem. The proof
uses automata-theoretic techniques. This key result extends, by means of
model-theoretic interpretations, to show decidability of the boundedness
problem for MSO and guarded second-order logic (GSO) over the classes of
structures of fixed finite tree-width. Further model-theoretic transfer
arguments allow us to derive major known decidability results for boundedness
for fragments of first-order logic as well as new ones
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