Expansion Trees with Cut

Abstract: Herbrand's theorem is one of the most fundamental insights in logic. From the syntactic point of view, it suggests a compact representation of proofs in classical first- and higher-order logic by recording the information of which instances have been chosen for which quantifiers. This compact representation is known in the literature as Miller's expansion tree proof. It is inherently analytic and hence corresponds to a cut-free sequent calculus proof. Recently several extensions of such proof representations to proofs with cuts have been proposed. These extensions are based on graphical formalisms similar to proof nets and are limited to prenex formulas. In this paper we present a new syntactic approach that directly extends Miller's expansion trees by cuts and covers also non-prenex formulas. We describe a cut-elimination procedure for our expansion trees with cut that is based on the natural reduction steps and show that it is weakly normalizing.