General Specification Language Research Articles

On Model-Checking Higher-Order Effectful Programs

Model-checking is one of the most powerful techniques for verifying systems and programs, which since the pioneering results by Knapik et al., Ong, and Kobayashi, is known to be applicable to functional programs with higher-order types against properties expressed by formulas of monadic second-order logic. What happens when the program in question, in addition to higher-order functions, also exhibits algebraic effects such as probabilistic choice or global store? The results in the literature range from those, mostly positive, about nondeterministic effects, to those about probabilistic effects, in the presence of which even mere reachability becomes undecidable. This work takes a fresh and general look at the problem, first of all showing that there is an elegant and natural way of viewing higher-order programs producing algebraic effects as ordinary higher-order recursion schemes. We then move on to consider effect handlers, showing that in their presence the model checking problem is bound to be undecidable in the general case, while it stays decidable when handlers have a simple syntactic form, still sufficient to capture so-called generic effects. Along the way, we hint at how a general specification language could look like, this way justifying some of the results in the literature, and deriving new ones.

Temporal and Event Information in Natural Language Text

In this paper, we discuss the role that temporal information plays in natural language text, specifically in the context of question answering systems. We define a descriptive framework with which we can examine the temporally sensitive aspects of natural language queries. We then investigate broadly what properties a general specification language would need, in order to mark up temporal and event information in text. We present a language, TimeML, which attempts to capture the richness of temporal and event related information in language, while demonstrating how it can play an important part in the development of more robust question answering systems.

Specification of nonmonotonic reasoning

ABSTRACT Two levels of description of nonmonotonic reasoning are distinguished. For these levels semantical formalizations are given. The first level is defined semantically by the notion of belief state frame, the second level by the notion of reasoning frame. We introduce two specification languages to describe nonmonotonic reasoning at each of the levels: (1) a specification language for level 1, with formal semantics based on belief state frames, (2) a fragment of infinitary temporal logic as a general specification language for level 2, with formal semantics based on reasoning frames. In our framework every level 2 description can be abstracted to level 1, and for every level 1 description there are level 2 descriptions which are a specialization of it.