Revisiting the Correspondence between Cut Elimination and Normalisation

This paper introduces a cut-elimination procedure of the intuitionistic sequent calculus and shows that it is isomorphic to the proof reduction of the intuitionistic natural deduction with general elimination and explicit substitution. It also proves strong normalization and Church-Rosser property of the cut-elimination procedure by projecting the sequent calculus to the natural deduction with general elimination without explicit substitution.KeywordsClassical LogicReduction RuleNatural DeductionSequent CalculusGeneral EliminationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

We introduce new proof systems for propositional logic, simple deduction Frege systems, general deduction Frege systems, and nested deduction Frege systems, which augment Frege systems with variants of the deduction rule. We give upper bounds on the lengths of proofs in Frege proof systems compared to lengths in these new systems. As applications we give near-linear simulations of the propositional Gentzen sequent calculus and the natural deduction calculus by Frege proofs. The length of a proof is the number of lines (or formulas) in the proof.A general deduction Frege proof system provides at most quadratic speedup over Frege proof systems. A nested deduction Frege proof system provides at most a nearly linear speedup over Frege system where by “nearly linear” is meant the ratio of proof lengths is O(α(n)) where α is the inverse Ackermann function. A nested deduction Frege system can linearly simulate the propositional sequent calculus, the tree-like general deduction Frege calculus, and the natural deduction calculus. Hence a Frege proof system can simulate all those proof systems with proof lengths bounded by O(n . α(n)). Also we show that a Frege proof of n lines can be transformed into a tree-like Frege proof of O(n log n) lines and of height O(log n). As a corollary of this fact we can prove that natural deduction and sequent calculus tree-like systems simulate Frege systems with proof lengths bounded by O(n log n).

System SKS is a set of rules for classical propositional logic presented in the calculus of structures. Like sequent systems and unlike natural deduction systems, it has an explicit cut rule, which is admissible. In contrast to sequent systems, the cut rule can easily be reduced to atomic form. This allows for a very simple cut elimination procedure based on plugging in parts of a proof, like normalisation in natural deduction and unlike cut elimination in the sequent calculus. It should thus be a good common starting point for investigations into both proof search as computation and proof normalisation as computation.

In 1994 Herbelin started and partially achieved the programme of showing that, for intuitionistic implicational logic, there is a Curry-Howard interpretation of sequent calculus into a variant of the λ-calculus, specifically a variant which manipulates formally “applicative contexts” and inverts the associativity of “applicative terms”. Herbelin worked with a fragment of sequent calculus with constraints on left introduction. In this paper we complete Herbelin’s programme for full sequent calculus, that is, sequent calculus without the mentioned constraints, but where permutative conversions necessarily show up. This requires the introduction of a lambda-like calculus for full sequent calculus and an extension of natural deduction that gives meaning to “applicative contexts” and “applicative terms”. Such extension is a calculus with modus ponens and primitive substitution that refines von Plato’s natural deduction; it is also a “coercion calculus”, in the sense of Cervesato and Pfenning. The proof-theoretical outcome is noteworthy: the puzzling relationship between cut and substitution is settled; and cut-elimination in sequent calculus is proven isomorphic to normalisation in the proposed natural deduction system. The isomorphism is the mapping that inverts the associativity of applicative terms.KeywordsReduction RuleNatural DeductionSequent CalculusApplicative ContextTyping RuleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Given a logic presented in a sequent calculus, a natural question is that of equivalence of proofs: to determine whether two given proofs are equated by any denotational semantics, ie any categorical interpretation of the logic compatible with its cut-elimination procedure. This notion can usually be captured syntactically by a set of rule permutations. Very generally, proofnets can be defined as combinatorial objects which provide canonical representatives of equivalence classes of proofs. In particular, the existence of proof nets for a logic provides a solution to the equivalence problem of this logic. In certain fragments of linear logic, it is possible to give a notion of proofnet with good computational properties, making it a suitable representation of proofs for studying the cut-elimination procedure, among other things. It has recently been proved that there cannot be such a notion of proofnets for the multiplicative (with units) fragment of linear logic, due to the equivalence problem for this logic being Pspace-complete. We investigate the multiplicative-additive (without unit) fragment of linear logic and show it is closely related to binary decision trees: we build a representation of proofs based on binary decision trees, reducing proof equivalence to decision tree equivalence, and give a converse encoding of binary decision trees as proofs. We get as our main result that the complexity of the proof equivalence problem of the studied fragment is Logspace-complete.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1502.01993

Gentzen's systems of natural deduction and sequent calculus were byproducts in his program of proving the consistency of arithmetic and analysis. It is suggested that the central component in his results on logical calculi was the use of a tree form for derivations. It allows the composition of derivations and the permutation of the order of application of rules, with a full control over the structure of derivations as a result. Recently found documents shed new light on the discovery of these calculi. In particular, Gentzen set up five different forms of natural calculi and gave a detailed proof of normalization for intuitionistic natural deduction. An early handwritten manuscript of his thesis shows that a direct translation from natural deduction to the axiomatic logic of Hilbert and Ackermann was, in addition to the influence of Paul Hertz, the second component in the discovery of sequent calculus. A system intermediate between the sequent calculus LI and axiomatic logic, denoted LIG in unpublished sources, is implicit in Gentzen's published thesis of 1934–35. The calculus has half rules, half “groundsequents,” and does not allow full cut elimination. Nevertheless, a translation from LI to LIG in the published thesis gives a subformula property for a complete class of derivations in LIG. After the thesis, Gentzen continued to work on variants of sequent calculi for ten more years, in the hope to find a consistency proof for arithmetic within an intuitionistic calculus.

A modification of natural deduction system for intuitionistic predicate logic, the extension of natural deduction system, will be defined. The main result of such modification will be that each conversion from the set of conversions of a cut-elimination procedure in the system of sequents has the corresponding conversion in the set of conversions of a normalization procedure in that extension of natural deduction.

The tetravalent modal logic ($${\mathcal {TML}}$$ TML ) is one of the two logics defined by Font and Rius (J Symb Log 65(2):481–518, 2000) (the other is the normal tetravalent modal logic$${{\mathcal {TML}}}^N$$ TML N ) in connection with Monteiro’s tetravalent modal algebras. These logics are expansions of the well-known Belnap–Dunn’s four-valued logic that combine a many-valued character (tetravalence) with a modal character. In fact, $${\mathcal {TML}}$$ TML is the logic that preserves degrees of truth with respect to tetravalent modal algebras. As Font and Rius observed, the connection between the logic $${\mathcal {TML}}$$ TML and the algebras is not so good as in $${{\mathcal {TML}}}^N$$ TML N , but, as a compensation, it has a better proof-theoretic behavior, since it has a strongly adequate Gentzen calculus (see Font and Rius in J Symb Log 65(2):481–518, 2000). In this work, we prove that the sequent calculus given by Font and Rius does not enjoy the cut-elimination property. Then, using a general method proposed by Avron et al. (Log Univ 1:41–69, 2006), we provide a sequent calculus for $${\mathcal {TML}}$$ TML with the cut-elimination property. Finally, inspired by the latter, we present a natural deduction system, sound and complete with respect to the tetravalent modal logic.

In this paper a strongly normalizing cut-elimination procedure is presented for classical logic. The procedure adapts the standard cut transformations, see for example []. In particular our cutelimination procedure requires no special annotations on formulae. We design a term calculus for a variant of Kleene’s sequent calculus G3 via the Curry-Howard correspondence and the cut-elimination steps are given as rewrite rules. In the strong normalization proof we adapt the symmetric reducibility candidates developed by Barbanera and Berardi.

For an arbitrary fixed element $\beta$ in $\{1; 2; 3; ...; \omega\}$ both a sequent calculus and a natural deduction calculus which axiomatise simple paracomplete logic $I_{2;\beta}$ are built. Additionally, a valuation semantic which is adequate to logic $I_{2;\beta}$ is constructed. For an arbitrary fixed element $\gamma$ in $\{1; 2; 3;...\}$ a cortege semantic which is adequate to logic $I_{2;\gamma}$ is described. A number of results obtainable with the axiomatisations and semantics in question are formulated.

Any set of truth-functional connectives has sequent calculus rules that can be generated systematically from the truth tables of the connectives. Such a sequent calculus gives rise to a multi-conclusion natural deduction system and to a version of Parigot’s free deduction. The elimination rules are “general,” but can be systematically simplified. Cut-elimination and normalization hold. Restriction to a single formula in the succedent yields intuitionistic versions of these systems. The rules also yield generalized lambda calculi providing proof terms for natural deduction proofs as in the Curry–Howard isomorphism. Addition of an indirect proof rule yields classical single-conclusion versions of these systems. Gentzen’s standard systems arise as special cases.

This paper studies the relationship between Argumentation Logic (AL), a recently defined logic based on the study of argumentation in AI, and classical Propositional Logic (PL). In particular, it shows that AL and PL are logically equivalent in that they have the same entailment relation from any given classically consistent theory. This equivalence follows from a correspondence between the non-acceptability of (arguments for) sentences in AL and Natural Deduction (ND) proofs of the complement of these sentences. The proof of this equivalence uses a restricted form of ND proofs, where hypotheses in the application of the Reductio of Absurdum inference rule are required to be “relevant” to the absurdity derived in the rule. The paper also discusses how the argumentative re-interpretation of PL could help control the application of ex-falso quodlibet in the presence of inconsistencies.

All the rules of the sequent calculus have the property that all the formulas that are present in the premises also occur in the conclusion. There is only one exception, the cut rule. In this chapter, it is shown using double induction that every theorem provable in Gentzen’s sequent calculi using the cut rule can also be proved without. One first proves that the mix rule is equivalent in proof-theoretic strength to the cut rule. Then one proves by induction on two complexity measures, the degree and the rank of a mix, that every application of mix can be eliminated. Several results follow from the cut-elimination theorem, including the so-called “mid-sequent” theorem and Herbrand’s theorem. In addition, one can prove the consistency of minimal, intuitionistic, and classical logic.

Constructive linear-time temporal logic: Proof systems and Kripke semantics

Full classical S5 in natural deduction with weak normalization