Reduction Monads and Their Signatures

TL;DR

This paper introduces reduction monads and reduction signatures to formalize and present various lambda calculus variants, linking algebraic and graphical perspectives, and establishing conditions for their existence.

Contribution

It defines reduction signatures and proves that certain classes specify reduction monads, unifying different lambda calculus variants within a categorical framework.

Findings

Defines reduction monads and signatures for lambda calculus

Establishes conditions for the existence of initial models

Shows applicability to standard lambda calculus variants

Abstract

In this work, we study 'reduction monads', which are essentially the same as monads relative to the free functor from sets into multigraphs. Reduction monads account for two aspects of the lambda calculus: on the one hand, in the monadic viewpoint, the lambda calculus is an object equipped with a well-behaved substitution; on the other hand, in the graphical viewpoint, it is an oriented multigraph whose vertices are terms and whose edges witness the reductions between two terms. We study presentations of reduction monads. To this end, we propose a notion of 'reduction signature'. As usual, such a signature plays the role of a virtual presentation, and specifies arities for generating operations---possibly subject to equations---together with arities for generating reduction rules. For each such signature, we define a category of models; any model is, in particular, a reduction monad. If the initial object of this category of models exists, we call it the 'reduction monad presented (or specified) by the given reduction signature'. Our main result identifies a class of reduction signatures which specify a reduction monad in the above sense. We show in the examples that our approach covers several standard variants of the lambda calculus.