A semantic approach to interpolation

Abstract

Craig interpolation is investigated for various types of formulae. By shifting the focus from syntactic to semantic interpolation, we generate, prove and classify a series of interpolation results for first-order logic. A few of these results non-trivially generalize known interpolation results; all the others are new. We also discuss someapplications of our results to the theory of institutions and of algebraic specifications,and a Craig-Robinson version of these results