A graphical representation of relational formulae with complementation

Abstract

We study translations of dyadic first-order sentences into equalities between relational expressions. The proposed translation techniques (which work also in the converse direction) exploit a graphical representation of formulae in a hybrid of the two formalisms. A major enhancement relative to previous work is that we can cope with the relational complement construct and with the negation connective. Complementation is handled by adopting a Smullyan-like uniform notation to classify and decompose relational expressions; negation is treated by means of a generalized graph-representation of formulae in L + ,