A complete axiomatization of a theory with feature and arity constraints

Abstract

CFT is a recent constraint system providing records as a logical data structure for logic programming and for natural language processing. It combines the rational tree system as defined for logic programming with the feature tree system as used in natural language processing. The formulae considered in this paper are all first-order-logic formulae over a signature of binary and unary predicates called features and arities, respectively. We establish the theory CFT by means of seven axiom schemes and show its completeness. Our completeness proof exhibits a terminating simplification system deciding validity and satisfiability of possibly quantified record descriptions.