Bicategorical type theory: semantics and syntax

TL;DR

This paper develops a new bicategorical type theory with semantics in structured bicategories, providing a formal foundation for contexts, types, and reductions, and verifies its correctness using the Coq proof assistant.

Contribution

It introduces the semantics and syntax of bicategorical type theory, including comprehension bicategories, and proves soundness within this framework.

Findings

Semantic interpretation in comprehension bicategories

Syntax derived from comprehension bicategories

Soundness proven in Coq proof assistant

Abstract

We develop semantics and syntax for bicategorical type theory. Bicategorical type theory features contexts, types, terms, and directed reductions between terms. This type theory is naturally interpreted in a class of structured bicategories. We start by developing the semantics, in the form of comprehension bicategories. Examples of comprehension bicategories are plentiful; we study both specific examples as well as classes of examples constructed from other data. From the notion of comprehension bicategory, we extract the syntax of bicategorical type theory, that is, judgment forms and structural inference rules. We prove soundness of the rules by giving an interpretation in any comprehension bicategory. The semantic aspects of our work are fully checked in the Coq proof assistant, based on the UniMath library.