We clarify the complexity of answering unions of conjunctive queries over knowledge bases formulated in the description logic S, the extension of ALC with transitive roles. Contrary to what existing partial results suggested, we show that the problem is, in fact, 2ExpTime-complete; hardness already holds in the presence of two transitive roles and for Boolean conjunctive queries. We complement this result by showing that the problem remains in coNExpTime when the input query is rooted or is restricted to use at most one transitive role (but may use arbitrarily many non-transitive roles).

We consider a variant of VASS extended with integer counters, denoted VASS+ℤ. These are automata equipped with ℕ- and ℤ-counters; the ℕ-counters are required to remain nonnegative and the ℤ-counters do not have this restriction. We study the complexity of the reachability problem for VASS+ℤ when the number of ℕ-counters is fixed. We show that reachability is NP-complete in 1-VASS+ℤ (i.e. when there is only one ℕ-counter) regardless of unary or binary encoding. For d ≥ 2, using a KLMST-based algorithm, we prove that reachability in d-VASS+ℤ lies in the complexity class ℱ_{d+2}. Our upper bound improves on the naively obtained Ackermannian complexity by simulating the ℤ-counters with ℕ-counters. To complement our upper bounds, we show that extending VASS with integer counters significantly lowers the number of ℕ-counters needed to exhibit hardness. We prove that reachability in unary 2-VASS+ℤ is PSpace-hard; without ℤ-counters this lower bound is only known in dimension 5. We also prove that reachability in unary 3-VASS+ℤ is Tower-hard. Without ℤ-counters, reachability in 3-VASS has elementary complexity and Tower-hardness is only known in dimension 8.

We study Two-Variable First-Order Logic, FO2, under semantic constraints that model hierarchically structured data. Our first logic extends FO2 with a linear order < and a chain of increasingly coarser equivalence relations E_1 ⊆ E_2 ⊆ ... . We show that its finite satisfiability problem is NExpTime-complete. We also demonstrate that a weaker variant of this logic without the linear order enjoys the exponential model property. Our second logic extends FO2 with a chain of nested total preorders ⪯_1 ⊆⪯_2 ⊆ ... . We prove that its finite satisfiability problem is also NExpTime-complete.However, we show that the complexity increases to ExpSpace-complete once access to the successor relations of the preorders is allowed. Our last result is the undecidability of FO2 with two independent chains of nested equivalence relations.

Maslov's class K is an expressive fragment of First-Order Logic known to have decidable satisfiability problem, whose exact complexity, however, has not been established so far. We show that K has the exponential-sized model property, and hence its satisfiability problem is NExpTime-complete. Additionally, we get new complexity results on related fragments studied in the literature, and propose a new decidable extension of the uniform one-dimensional fragment (without equality). Our approach involves a use of satisfiability games tailored to K and a novel application of paradoxical tournament graphs.

A uniformisation of a binary relation is a functional relation contained in it, with the same domain. The uniformisation problem asks whether such a uniformisation can be defined in a given formalism.

We view languages of words over a product alphabet A x B as relations between words over A and words over B. This leads to the notion of regular relations - relations given by a regular language. We ask when it is possible to find regular uniformisations of regular relations. The answer depends on the structure or shape of the underlying model: it is true e.g. for ω-words, while false for words over ℤ or for infinite trees. In this paper we focus on countable orders. Our main result characterises, which countable linear orders D have the property that every regular relation between words over D has a regular uniformisation. As it turns out, the only obstacle for uniformisability is the one displayed in the case of ℤ - non-trivial automorphisms of the given structure. Thus, we show that either all regular relations over D have regular uniformisations, or there is a non-trivial automorphism of D and even the simple relation of choice cannot be uniformised. Moreover, this dichotomy is effective.

Given R a binary relation between words (which we treat as a language over a product alphabet AxB), a uniformisation of it is another relation L included in R which chooses a single word over B, for each word over A whenever there exists one. It is known that MSO, the full class of regular languages, is strong enough to define a uniformisation for each of its relations. The quest of this work is to see which other formalisms, weaker than MSO, also have this property. In this paper, we solve this problem for pseudo-varieties of semigroups: we show that no nonempty pseudo-variety weaker than MSO can provide uniformisations for its relations.