Links' Seminars and Public Events | ![]() ![]() |
Fri, March 24, 2023 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Mamadou KANTE |
Fri, January 20, 2023 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Tito Speaker: Lê Thành Dũng Nguyễn, aka “Tito” — nguyentito.eu/ Title: Polyregular functions: some recent developments Abstract: The class of polyregular functions is composed of the string-to-string functions computed by pebble transducers. While this machine model (which extends two-way finite transducers) is two decades old, several alternative characterizations of polyregular functions have been discovered recently [Bojańczyk 2018; Bojańczyk, Kiefer & Lhote 2019], demonstrating their canonicity. The name comes from the polynomial bound on the growth rate of these functions: |f(w)| = |w|^O(1) where |w| is the length of the string w. In this talk, after recalling this context, I will present some subsequent developments in which I have been involved: * the subclass of comparison-free polyregular (or “polyblind”) functions, definable through a natural restriction of pebble transducers, which Pierre Pradic and I actually discovered while studying a linear λ-calculus; * some results that either relate the growth rate of a polyregular function (comparison-free or not) to the “resources” needed to compute it, or show that there is no such relationship. |
Fri, January 13, 2023 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Sarah Winter Speaker: Sarah Winter — sarahwinter.net/ Title: A Regular and Complete Notion of Delay for Streaming String Transducers Abstract: The notion of delay between finite transducers is a core element of numerous fundamental results of transducer theory. The goal of this work is to provide a similar notion for more complex abstract machines: we introduce a new notion of delay tailored to measure the similarity between streaming string transducers (SST). We show that our notion is regular: we design a finite automaton that can check whether the delay between any two SSTs executions is smaller than some given bound. As a consequence, our notion enjoys good decidability properties: in particular, while equivalence between non-deterministic SSTs is undecidable, we show that equivalence up to fixed delay is decidable. Moreover, we show that our notion has good completeness properties: we prove that two SSTs are equivalent if and only if they are equivalent up to some (computable) bounded delay. Together with the regularity of our delay notion, it provides an alternative proof that SSTs equivalence is decidable. Finally, the definition of our delay notion is machine-independent, as it only depends on the origin semantics of SSTs. As a corollary, the completeness result also holds for equivalent machine models such as deterministic two-way transducers, or MSO transducers. This is joint work with Emmanuel Filiot, Ismaël Jecker, and Christof Löding. |
Fri, December 16, 2022 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Sandra Kiefer CANCELLED: we will attempt to reschedule this seminar to early 2023. Speaker: Sandra Kiefer — www.lics.rwth-aachen.d.....dx/1/ Title: TBA Abstract: TBA |
Fri, December 9, 2022 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar by Rémi Morvan Speaker: Rémi Morvan — www.morvan.xyz/ Titre: Approximation and Semantic Tree-width of Conjunctive Regular Path Queries Abstract: We show that the problem of whether a query is equivalent to a query of tree-width k is decidable, for the class of Unions of Conjunctive Regular Path Queries with two-way navigation (UC2RPQs). A previous result by Barceló, Romero, and Vardi has shown decidability for the case k=1, and here we show that decidability in fact holds for any arbitrary k>1. The algorithm is in 2ExpSpace, but we show that the complexity drops to the second level of the polynomial hierarchy for a restricted but practically relevant case of queries obtained by only allowing simple regular expressions. We also investigate the related problem of approximating a UC2RPQ by queries of small tree-width. We exhibit an algorithm which, for any fixed number k, builds the maximal under-approximation of tree-width k of a UC2RPQ. The maximal under-approximation of tree-width k of a query q is a query q' of tree-width k which is contained in q in a maximal and unique way, that is, such that for every query q'' of tree-width k, if q'' is contained in q then q'' is also contained in q'. Joint work with Diego Figueira. |
Fri, November 18, 2022 11:00 am 11:30 am | Seminar by Sarah Winter CANCELLED for COVID: we will attempt to reschedule this seminar to early 2023 Speaker: Sarah Winter — sarahwinter.net/ Title: A Regular and Complete Notion of Delay for Streaming String Transducers Abstract: The notion of delay between finite transducers is a core element of numerous fundamental results of transducer theory. The goal of this work is to provide a similar notion for more complex abstract machines: we introduce a new notion of delay tailored to measure the similarity between streaming string transducers (SST). We show that our notion is regular: we design a finite automaton that can check whether the delay between any two SSTs executions is smaller than some given bound. As a consequence, our notion enjoys good decidability properties: in particular, while equivalence between non-deterministic SSTs is undecidable, we show that equivalence up to fixed delay is decidable. Moreover, we show that our notion has good completeness properties: we prove that two SSTs are equivalent if and only if they are equivalent up to some (computable) bounded delay. Together with the regularity of our delay notion, it provides an alternative proof that SSTs equivalence is decidable. Finally, the definition of our delay notion is machine-independent, as it only depends on the origin semantics of SSTs. As a corollary, the completeness result also holds for equivalent machine models such as deterministic two-way transducers, or MSO transducers. This is joint work with Emmanuel Filiot, Ismaël Jecker, and Christof Löding. |
Fri, October 21, 2022 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Online seminar by Pierre Pradic Speaker: Pierre Pradic — perso.ens-lyon.fr/pierre.pradic/ Title: Synthesizing Nested Relational Queries from Implicit Specifications Abstract: Derived datasets can be defined implicitly or explicitly. An implicit definition (of dataset O in terms of datasets I⃗ ) is a logical specification involving the source data I⃗ and the interface data O. It is a valid definition of O in terms of I⃗ , if any two models of the specification agreeing on I⃗ agree on O. In contrast, an explicit definition is a query that produces O from I⃗ . Variants of Beth's theorem state that one can convert implicit definitions to explicit ones. Further, this conversion can be done effectively given a proof witnessing implicit definability in a suitable proof system. In this talk, I will discuss an analogous effective implicit-to-explicit result for nested relations: implicit definitions, given in the natural logic for nested relations, can be effectively converted to explicit definitions in the nested relational calculus NRC. I will first spend some time explaining what NRC is and what logic we use to describe implicit definitions of nested queries. Then I will present the results obtained in our papers, attempt to give some intuitions on the proof of the main theorem and say a few words on in particular the proof-theoretic techniques and concerns that come up (namely, cut-elimination and focussing) and how this can impact the complexity of extracting explicit definitions from proofs of implicit definability. Then if time allows I will discuss a more general model-theoretic result that we first used to give a non-constructive proof of our theorem, and some ideas that we have towards making it constructive and bounding the complexity of extracting explicit definitions. This is Joint work with Michael Benedikt and Christoph Wenhard. The main results I will be discussing were written up in arxiv.org/abs/2005.06503 and arxiv.org/abs/2209.08299. Online |
Fri, September 30, 2022 10:00 am 11:30 am | Seminar by Liat Peterfreund Speaker: Liat Peterfreund — sites.google.com/view/liatpeterfreund/ Title: Querying Incomplete Numerical Data: Between Certain and Possible Answers Abstract: Queries with aggregation and arithmetic operations, as well as incomplete data, are common in real-world databases, but we lack a good understanding of how they should interact. On the one hand, systems based on SQL provide ad-hoc rules for numerical nulls, on the other, theoretical research largely concentrates on the standard notions of certain and possible answers which in the presence of numerical attributes and aggregates are often meaningless. In this work, we define a principled compositional framework for databases with numerical nulls and answering queries with arithmetic and aggregations over them. We assume that missing values are given by probability distributions associated with marked nulls, which yields a model of probabilistic bag databases. We concentrate on queries that resemble standard SQL with arithmetic and aggregation and show that they are measurable, and that their outputs have a finite representation. Moreover, since the classical forms of answers provide little information in the numerical setting, we look at the probability that numerical values in output tuples belong to specific intervals. Even though their exact computation is intractable, we show efficient approximation algorithms to compute such probabilities. The talk is based on joint work with Marco Console and Leonid Libkin, and will be presented in PODS 2023. |
Fri, September 16, 2022 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Seminar Luis Galárraga Speaker : Luis Galárraga — luisgalarraga.de/about/ Title: Computing How-Provenance for SPARQL Queries via Query Rewriting Abstract: Over the past few years, we have witnessed the emergence of large knowledge graphs built by extracting and combining information from multiple sources. This has propelled many advances in query processing over knowledge graphs, however the aspect of providing provenance explanations for query results has so far been mostly neglected. In this talk I will present SPARQLprov, a method based on query rewriting, to compute how-provenance polynomials for SPARQL queries over knowledge graphs. Contrary to existing works, SPARQLprov is system-agnostic and can be applied to standard and already deployed SPARQL engines without the need of customized extensions. To do so, we rely on spm-semirings to compute polynomial annotations that respect the property of commutation with homomorphisms on monotonic and non-monotonic SPARQL queries without aggregate functions. An evaluation on real and synthetic data shows that SPARQLprov over standard engines competes with state-of-the-art solutions for how-provenance computation, while covering a larger fragment of the query language. |
Fri, July 1, 2022 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Arnaud Durand |
Fri, June 10, 2022 10:00 am 11:00 am | Séminaire Corentin Barloy Title:The Regular Languages of First-Order Logic with One Alternation Abstract: The regular languages with a neutral letter expressible in first-order logic with one alternation are characterized. Specifically, it is shown that if an arbitrary Σ2 formula defines a regular language with a neutral letter, then there is an equivalent Σ2 formula that only uses the order predicate. This shows that the so-called Central Conjecture of Straubing holds for Σ2 over languages with a neutral letter, the first progress on the Conjecture in more than 20 years. To show the characterization, lower bounds against polynomial-size depth-3 Boolean circuits with constant top fan-in are developed. The heart of the combinatorial argument resides in studying how positions within a language are determined from one another, a technique of independent interest. |
Fri, February 25, 2022 11:00 am 12:00 pm | Séminaire Nico |