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Title Graph Logics with Rational Relations and the Generalized Intersection Problem
Authors Pablo Barceló, Diego Figueira, Leonid Libkin
Publication date 2012
Abstract We investigate some basic questions about the interaction
of regular and rational relations on words. The primary
motivation comes from the study of logics for querying graph
topology, which have recently found numerous applications. Such
logics use conditions on paths expressed by regular languages
and relations, but they often need to be extended by rational
relations such as subword (factor) or subsequence. Evaluating
formulae in such extended graph logics boils down to checking
nonemptiness of the intersection of rational relations with regular
or recognizable relations (or, more generally, to the generalized
intersection problem, asking whether some projections of a
regular relation have a nonempty intersection with a given
rational relation).
We prove that for several basic and commonly used rational
relations, the intersection problem with regular relations is either
undecidable (e.g., for subword or suffix, and some generalizations),
or decidable with non-multiply-recursive complexity (e.g.,
for subsequence and its generalizations). These results are used to
rule out many classes of graph logics that freely combine regular
and rational relations, as well as to provide the simplest problem
related to verifying lossy channel systems that has non-multiplyrecursive
complexity. We then prove a dichotomy result for logics
combining regular conditions on individual paths and rational
relations on paths, by showing that the syntactic form of formulae
classifies them into either efficiently checkable or undecidable
cases. We also give examples of rational relations for which such
logics are decidable even without syntactic restrictions.
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Pages 115-124
Conference name ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science
Publisher IEEE Computer Society Press (Los Alamitos, CA, USA)
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