views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author, and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of any sponsoring institution, the U.S. government, or any other entity. Keywords: refinement types, logical frameworks, subtyping, intersection types, The logical framework LF and its metalogic Twelf can be used to encode and reason about a wide variety of logics, languages, and other deductive systems in a formal, machine-checkable way. Recent studies have shown that ML-like languages can profitably be extended with a notion of subtyping called refinement types. A refinement type discipline uses an extra layer of term classification above the usual type system to more accurately capture certain properties of terms. I propose that adding refinement types to LF is both useful and practical. To support the claim, I exhibit an extension of LF with refinement types called LFR, work out important details of its metatheory, delineate a practical algorithm for refinement type reconstruction, and present several case studies

We show how to combine a general purpose type system for an existing language with support for programming with binders and contexts by refining the type system of ML with a restricted form of dependent types where index objects are drawn from contextual LF. This allows the user to specify formal systems within the logical framework LF and index ML types with contextual LF objects. Our language design keeps the index language generic only requiring decidability of equality of the index language providing a modular design. To illustrate the elegance and effectiveness of our language, we give programs for closure conversion and normalization by evaluation. Our three key technical contribution are: 1) a bi-directional type system for our core language which is centered around refinement substitutions instead of constraint solving. As a consequence, type checking is decidable and easy to trust, although constraint solving may be undecidable. 2) a big-step environment based operational semantics with environments which lends itself to efficient implementation. 3) We prove our language to be type safe and have mechanized our theoretical development in the proof assistant Coq using the fresh approach to binding.