Coalgebraic Monads

This paper introduces coalgebraic monads as a unified model of term algebras covering fundamental examples such as initial algebras, final coalgebras, rational terms and term graphs. We develop a general method for obtaining finitary coalgebraic monads which allows us to generalise the notion of rational term and term graph to categories other than Set. As an application we sketch part of the correctness of the the term graph implementation of functional programming languages.     

A rational reconstruction of the domain of feature structures

Feature structures are employed in various forms in many areas of linguistics. Informally, one can picture a feature structure as a sort of tree decorated with information about constraints requiring that specific subtrees be identical (isomorphic). Here I show that this informal picture of feature structures can be used to characterize exactly the class of feature structures under their usual subsumption ordering. Furthermore, once a precise definition of tree is fixed, this characterization makes use only of standard domain-theoretic notions regarding the information borne by elements in a domain, thus removing (or better, explaining) all apparentlyad hoc choices in the original definition of feature structures. In addition, I show how this characterization can be parameterized in order to yield similar characterizations of various different notions of feature structure, including acyclic structures, structures with appropriateness conditions and structures with apartness conditions (used to model path inequations). The generalizations to other notions of feature structure also emphasize that the construction given here is in fact independent of the application to feature structures.This research has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as part of Sonderforschungsbereich 314, Projekt N3.     

Reachability Analysis of Synchronized PA Systems

We present a generic approach for the analysis of concurrent programs with (unbounded) dynamic creation of threads and recursive procedure calls. We define a model for such programs based on a set of term rewrite rules where terms represent control configurations. The reachability problem for this model is undecidable. Therefore, we propose a method for analyzing such models based on computing abstractions of their sets of computation paths. Our approach allows to compute such abstractions as least solutions of a system of (path language) constraints. More precisely, given a program and two regular sets of configurations (process terms) T and T^′, we provide (1) a construction of a system of constraints which characterizes the set of computation paths leading from T to T^′, and (2) a generic framework, based on abstract interpretation, allowing to solve this system in various abstract domains leading to abstract analysis with different precision and cost.     

Decision procedures for term algebras with integer constraints

Term algebras can model recursive data structures which are widely used in programming languages. To verify programs we must be able to reason about these structures. However, as programming languages often involve multiple data domains, in program verification decision procedures for a single theory are usually not applicable. An important class of mixed constraints consists of combinations of data structures with integer constraints on the size of data structures. Such constraints can express memory safety properties such as absence of memory overflow and out-of-bound array access, which are crucial for program correctness. In this paper we extend the theory of term algebras with the length function which maps a term to its size, resulting in a combined theory of term algebras and Presburger arithmetic. This arithmetic extension provides a natural but tight coupling between the two theories, and hence the general purpose combination methods like Nelson-Oppen combination are not applicable. We present decision procedures for quantifier-free theories in structures with an infinite constant domain and with a finite constant domain. We also present a quantifier elimination procedure for the extended first-order theory that can remove a block of existential quantifiers in one step.     

Off-Line Parsability and the Well-Foundedness of Subsumption

Typed feature structures are used extensively for the specification of linguistic information in many formalisms. The subsumption relation orders TFSs by their information content. We prove that subsumption of acyclic TFSs is well founded, whereas in the presence of cycles general TFS subsumption is not well founded. We show an application of this result for parsing, where the well-foundedness of subsumption is used to guarantee termination for grammars that are off-line parsable. We define a new version of off-line parsability that is less strict than the existing one; thus termination is guaranteed for parsing with a larger set of grammars.     

On subsumption in distributed derivations

In this paper we study the subsumption inference rule in the context of distributed deduction. It is well known that the unrestricted application of subsumption may destroy the fairness and thus the completeness of a deduction strategy. Solutions to this problem in sequential theorem proving are known. We observe that in distributed automated deduction, subsumption may also thwartmonotonicity, a dual property of soundness, in addition to completeness. Not only do the solutions for the sequential case not apply, even proper subsumption may destroy monotonicity in the distributed case.We present these problems and propose a general solution that treats subsumption as a composition of a replacement inference rule,replacement subsumption, and a deletion inference rule,variant subsumption. (Proper subsumption, in this case, becomes a derived inference rule.) We define a newdistributed subsumption inference rule, which has all the desirable properties: it allows subsumption, including subsumption of variants, in a distributed derivation, while preserving fairness and monotonicity. It also works in both sequential and distributed environments.We conclude the paper with some discussion of the different behavior of subsumption in different architectures.     

Murg term rewrite systems

The union of a monadic and a right-ground term rewrite system is called a murg term rewrite system. We show that for murg TRSs the ground common ancestor problem is undecidable. We show that for a murg term rewrite system it is undecidable whether the set of descendants of a ground tree is a recognizable tree language. We show that it is undecidable whether a murg term rewrite system over Σ preserves Σ-recognizability.     

A Process Calculus with Finitary Comprehended Terms

We introduce the notion of an ACP process algebra and the notion of a meadow enriched ACP process algebra. The former notion originates from the models of the axiom system ACP. The latter notion is a simple generalization of the former notion to processes in which data are involved, the mathematical structure of data being a meadow. Moreover, for all associative operators from the signature of meadow enriched ACP process algebras that are not of an auxiliary nature, we introduce variable-binding operators as generalizations. These variable-binding operators, which give rise to comprehended terms, have the property that they can always be eliminated. Thus, we obtain a process calculus whose terms can be interpreted in all meadow enriched ACP process algebras. Use of the variable-binding operators can have a major impact on the size of terms.     

Comparing the notions of optimality in CP-nets,strategic games and soft constraints

The notion of optimality naturally arises in many areas of applied mathematics and computer science concerned with decision making. Here we consider this notion in the context of three formalisms used for different purposes in reasoning about multi-agent systems: strategic games, CP-nets, and soft constraints. To relate the notions of optimality in these formalisms we introduce a natural qualitative modification of the notion of a strategic game. We show then that the optimal outcomes of a CP-net are exactly the Nash equilibria of such games. This allows us to use the techniques of game theory to search for optimal outcomes of CP-nets and vice-versa, to use techniques developed for CP-nets to search for Nash equilibria of the considered games. Then, we relate the notion of optimality used in the area of soft constraints to that used in a generalization of strategic games, called graphical games. In particular we prove that for a natural class of soft constraints that includes weighted constraints every optimal solution is both a Nash equilibrium and Pareto efficient joint strategy. For a natural mapping in the other direction we show that Pareto efficient joint strategies coincide with the optimal solutions of soft constraints.      

Constrained relative least general generalization for Inducing Constraint Logic Programs

Relative least general generalization proposed by Plotkin, is widely used for generalizing first-order clauses in Inductive Logic Programming, and this paper describes an extension of Plotkin’s work to allow various computation domains: Herbrand Universe, sets, numerical data, ect. The ?-subsumption in Plotkin’s framework is replaced by a more general constraint-based subsumption. Since this replacement is analogous to that of unification by constraint solving in Constraint Logic Programming, the resultant method can be viewed as a Constraint Logic Programming version of relative least general generalization. Constraint-based subsumption, however, leads to a search on an intractably large hypothesis space. We therefore providemeta-level constraints that are used as semantic bias on the hypothesis language. The constraintsfunctional dependency andmonotonicity are introduced by analyzing clausal relationships. Finally, the advantage of the proposed method is demonstrated through a simple layout problem, where geometric constraints used in space planning tasks are produced automatically.     

Completeness issues in RUE-NRF deduction: The undecidability of viability

We show that the algorithm directly induced by the viability definition in Ref. [4] does not terminate in general. As a consequence, RUE-resolution in strong form is not complete. Moreover, we show that ground query processing forcovered pure logic programs can be reduced to computing viability. Since the problem of ground query processing is strictly recursively enumerable even under the above restrictions, it follows that the notion of viability is undecidable. Finally, we present a modified viability check that solves the non-termination problem for ground terms.Work supported in part by NSF grants IRI-9015251 and IRI-9109755 and by Army Research office grant DAAL-03-92-G-0225.     

Tilings and Submonoids of Metabelian Groups

In this paper we show that membership in finitely generated submonoids is undecidable for the free metabelian group of rank 2 and for the wreath product ℤ≀(ℤ×ℤ). We also show that subsemimodule membership is undecidable for finite rank free (ℤ×ℤ)-modules. The proof involves an encoding of Turing machines via tilings. We also show that rational subset membership is undecidable for two-dimensional lamplighter groups.     

An initial algebra approach to term rewriting systems with variable binders

We present an extension of first-order term rewriting systems. It involves variable binding in the term language. We develop systems called binding term rewriting systems (BTRSs) in a stepwise manner. First we present the term language, then formulate equational logic. Finally, we define rewriting systems. This development is novel because we follow the initial algebra approach in an extended notion of Σ-algebras in various functor categories. These are based on Fiore-Plotkin-Turi’s presheaf semantics of variable binding and Lüth-Ghani’s monadic semantics of term rewriting systems. We characterise the terms, equational logic and rewrite systems for BTRSs as initial algebras in suitable categories. Then, we show an important rewriting property of BTRSs: orthogonal BTRSs are confluent. Moreover, by using the initial algebra semantics, we give a complete characterisation of termination of BTRSs. Finally, we discuss our design choice of BTRSs from a semantic perspective. An erlier version appeared in Proc. Fifth ACM-SIGPLAN International Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP2003).     

Approximate Quantified Constraint Solving by Cylindrical Box Decomposition

This paper applies interval methods to a classical problem in computer algebra. Let a quantified constraint be a first-order formula over the real numbers. As shown by A. Tarski in the 1930's, such constraints, when restricted to the predicate symbols <, = and function symbols +, ×, are in general solvable. However, the problem becomes undecidable, when we add function symbols like sin. Furthermore, all exact algorithms known up to now are too slow for big examples, do not provide partial information before computing the total result, cannot satisfactorily deal with interval constants in the input, and often generate huge output. As a remedy we propose an approximation method based on interval arithmetic. It uses a generalization of the notion of cylindrical decomposition—as introduced by G. Collins. We describe an implementation of the method and demonstrate that, for quantified constraints without equalities, it can efficiently give approximate information on problems that are too hard for current exact methods.     

Proving termination of (conditional) rewrite systems

In this paper an important problem in the domain of term rewriting, the termination of (conditional) rewrite systems, is dealt with. We show that in many applications, well-founded orderings on terms which only make use of syntactic information of a rewrite systemR, do not suffice for proving termination ofR. Indeed sometimes semantic information is needed to orient a rewrite rule. Therefore we integrate a semantic interpretation of rewrite systems and terms into a well-founded ordering on terms: the notion ofsemantic ordering is the first main contribution of this paper. The use and usefulness of the semantic ordering in proving termination is illustrated by means of some realistic examples.Furthermore the concept of semantic information induces a novel approach for proving termination inconditional rewrite systems. The idea is to employ not only semantic information contained in the terms that are to be compared, but also extra (semantic) information contained in the premiss of the conditional equation in which the terms appear. This leads to our second contribution in the termination problem area: the notion ofcontextual ordering andcontextual semantic ordering. Thecontextual approach allows to prove termination of conditional rewrite systems where all classical partial orderings would fail.     

Containment of Conjunctive Queries on Annotated Relations

We study containment and equivalence of (unions of) conjunctive queries on relations annotated with elements of a commutative semiring. Such relations and the semantics of positive relational queries on them were introduced in a recent paper as a generalization of set semantics, bag semantics, incomplete databases, and databases annotated with various kinds of provenance information. We obtain positive decidability results and complexity characterizations for databases with lineage, why-provenance, and provenance polynomial annotations, for both conjunctive queries and unions of conjunctive queries. At least one of these results is surprising given that provenance polynomial annotations seem “more expressive” than bag semantics and under the latter, containment of unions of conjunctive queries is known to be undecidable. The decision procedures rely on interesting variations on the notion of containment mappings. We also show that for any positive semiring (a very large class) and conjunctive queries without self-joins, equivalence is the same as isomorphism.     

Symbolic execution with abstraction

We address the problem of error detection for programs that take recursive data structures and arrays as input. Previously we proposed a combination of symbolic execution and model checking for the analysis of such programs: we put a bound on the size of the program inputs and/or the search depth of the model checker to limit the search state space. Here we look beyond bounded model checking and consider state matching techniques to limit the state space. We describe a method for examining whether a symbolic state that arises during symbolic execution is subsumed by another symbolic state. Since the number of symbolic states may be infinite, subsumption is not enough to ensure termination. Therefore, we also consider abstraction techniques for computing and storing abstract states during symbolic execution. Subsumption checking determines whether an abstract state is being revisited, in which case the model checker backtracks—this enables analysis of an under-approximation of the program behaviors. We illustrate the technique with abstractions for lists and arrays. We also discuss abstractions for more general data structures. The abstractions encode both the shape of the program heap and the constraints on numeric data. We have implemented the techniques in the Java PathFinder tool and we show their effectiveness on Java programs. This paper is an extended version of Anand et al. (Proceedings of SPIN, pp. 163–181, 2006).     

Closed, Open, and Robust Timed Networks

We consider verification of safety properties for parameterized systems of timed processes, so called timed networks. A timed network consists of a finite state process, called a controller, and an arbitrary set of identical timed processes. In [Parosh Aziz Abdulla and Bengt Jonsson. Model checking of systems with many identical timed processes. Theoretical Computer Science, 290(1):241–264, 2003] it was shown that checking safety properties is decidable in the case where each timed process is equipped with a single real-valued clock. In [P. Abdulla, J. Deneux, and P. Mahata. Multi-clock timed networks. In Proc. LICS' 04, pages 345–354. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2004], we showed that this is no longer possible if each timed process is equipped with at least two real-valued clocks. In this paper, we study two subclasses of timed networks: closed and open timed networks. In closed timed networks, all clock constraints are non-strict, while in open timed networks, all clock constraints are strict (thus corresponds to syntactic removal of equality testing). We show that the problem becomes decidable for closed timed network, while it remains undecidable for open timed networks. We also consider robust semantics of timed networks by introducing timing fuzziness through semantic removal of equality testing. We show that the problem is undecidable both for closed and open timed networks under the robust semantics.