The notion of a recognizable sef offinite graphs is introduced. Every set of finite graphs, that is definable in monadic second-order logic is recognizable, but not vice versa. The monadic second-order theory of a context-free set of graphs is decidable. 0 19W Academic Press. Inc. This paper begins an investigation of the monadic second-order logic of graphs and of sets of graphs, using techniques from universal algebra, and the theory of formal languages. (By a graph, we mean a finite directed hyperedge-labelled hypergraph, equipped with a sequence of distinguished vertices.) A survey of this research can be found in Courcelle [ 111. An algebraic structure on the set of graphs (in the above sense) has been proposed by Bauderon and Courcelle [2,7]. The notion of a recognizable set of finite graphs follows, as an instance of the general notion of recognizability introduced by Mezei and Wright in [25]. A graph can also be considered as a logical structure of a certain type. Hence, properties of graphs can be written in first-order logic or in secondorder logic. It turns out that monadic second-order logic, where quantifications over sets of vertices and sets of edges are used, is a reasonably powerful logical language (in which many usual graph properties can be written), for which one can obtain decidability results. These decidability results do not hold for second-order logic, where quantifications over binary relations can also be used. Our main theorem states that every definable set of finite graphs (i.e., every set that is the set of finite graphs satisfying a graph property expressible in monadic second-order logic) is recognizable. * This work has been supported by the “Programme de Recherches Coordonntes: Mathematiques et Informatique.”

By considering graphs as logical structures, one...

We survey the basic results on regular tree languages over unranked alphabets; that is, we use an unranked alphabet for the labels of nodes, we allow unbounded, yet regular, degree nodes and we treat sequences of trees that, following Courcelle, we call hedges. The survey was begun by the first and third authors. Subsequently, when they discovered that the second author had already written a summary of this view of tree automata and languages, the three authors decided to join forces and produce a consistent review of the area. The survey is still unfinished because we have been unable to find the time to finish it. We are making it available in this unfinished form as a research report because it has, already, been heavily cited in the literature.

Abstract. The paper shows that, by an appropriate choice of a rich assertional language, it is possible to extend the utility of symbolic model checking beyond the realm of bdd-represented nite-state systems into the domain of in nite-state systems, leading to a powerful technique for uniform veri cation of unbounded (parameterized) process networks. The main contributions of the paper are a formulation of a general framework for symbolic model checking of in nite-state systems, a demonstration that many individual examples of uniformly veri ed parameterized designs that appear in the literature are special cases of our general approach, verifying the correctness of the Futurebus+ design for all single-bus con gurations, extending the technique to tree architectures, and establishing that the presented method is a precise dual to the top-down invariant generation method used in deductive veri cation. 1

The MONA tool provides an implementation of the decision procedures for the logics WS1S and WS2S. It has been used for numerous applications, and it is remarkably efficient in practice, even though it faces a theoretically non-elementary worst-case complexity. The implementation has matured over a period of six years. Compared to the first naive version, the present tool is faster by several orders of magnitude. This speedup is obtained from many different contributions working on all levels of the compilation and execution of formulas. We present a selection of implementation "secrets" that have been discovered and tested over the years, including formula reductions, DAGification, guided tree automata, three-valued logic, eager minimization, BDD-based automata representations, and cache-conscious data structures. We describe these techniques and quantify their respective effects by experimenting with separate versions of the MONA tool that in turn omit each of them.

A set constraint is of the form exp 1 ' exp 2 where exp 1 and exp 2 are set expressions constructed using variables, function symbols, projection symbols, and the set union, intersection and complement symbols. While the satisfiability problem for such constraints is open, restricted classes have been useful in program analysis. The main result herein is a decision procedure for definite set constraints which are of the restricted form a ' exp where a contains only constants, variables and function symbols, and exp is a positive set expression (that is, it does not contain the complement symbol). A conjunction of such constraints, whenever satisfiable, has a least model and the algorithm will output an explicit representation of this model. 1 1 Introduction We consider a formalism for elementary set algebra which is useful for describing properties of programs whose underlying domain of computation is a Herbrand universe. The domain of discourse for this formalism is the powerset of...

We discuss in this paper how connections, discovered almost forty years ago, between logics and automata can be used in practice. For such logics expressing regular sets, we have developed tools that allow efficient symbolic reasoning not attainable by theorem proving or symbolic model checking. We explain how the logic-automaton connection is already exploited in a limited way for the case of Quantified Boolean Logic, where Binary Decision Diagrams act as automata. Next, we indicate how BDD data structures and algorithms can be extended to yield a practical decision procedure for a more general logic, namely WS1S, the Weak Secondorder theory of One Successor. Finally, we mention applications of the automaton-logic connection to software engineering and program verification. 1

This paper is about the W3C standard node-addressing language for XML documents, called XPath. XPath is still under development. Version 2.0 appeared in 2001 while the theoretical foundations of Version 1.0 (dating from 1998) are still being widely studied. The paper aims at bringing XPath to a "stable fixed point" in its development: a version which is expressively complete, still manageable computationally, with a user-friendly syntax and a natural semantics.

. We provide first-order axioms for the theories of finite trees with bounded branching and finite trees with arbitrary (finite) branching. The signature is chosen to express, in a natural way, those properties of trees most relevant to linguistic theories. These axioms provide a foundation for results in linguistics that are based on reasoning formally about such properties. We include some observations on the expressive power of these theories relative to traditional language complexity classes. Key words: Trees, First-Order Theories, Axiomatizations, Natural Language Syntax, EhrenfeuchtFra iss'e Games 1. INTRODUCTION There has been, over the last ten or fifteen years, a growing body of research in generative and computational linguistics that depends to a great extent on reasoning formally about trees. For example, there are a number of grammatical formalisms that have been proposed that manipulate logical descriptions of the trees representing the syntactic structure of strings r...

Contents 1 Language Complexity in Generative Grammar 3 Part I The Descriptive Complexity of Strongly Context-Free Languages 11 2 Introduction to Part I 13 3 Trees as Elementary Structures 15 4 L 2 K;P and SnS 25 5 Definability and Non-Definability in L 2 K;P 35 6 Conclusion of Part I 57 DRAFT 2 / Contents Part II The Generative Capacity of GB Theories 59 7 Introduction to Part II 61 8 The Fundamental Structures of GB Theories 69 9 GB and Non-definability in L 2 K;P 79 10 Formalizing X-Bar Theory 93 11 The Lexicon, Subcategorization, Theta-theory, and Case Theory 111 12 Binding and Control 119 13 Chains 131 14 Reconstruction 157 15 Limitations of the Interpretation 173 16 Conclusion of Part II 179 A Index of Definitions 183 Bibliography DRAFT 1<