Comprehension, Use Cases and Requirements

Within requirements engineering it is generally accepted that in writing specifications (or indeed any requirements phase document), one attempts to produce an artefact which will be simple to comprehend for the user. That is, whether the document is intended for customers to validate requirements, or engineers to understand what the design must deliver, comprehension is an important goal for the author. Indeed, advice on producing ‘readable’ or ‘understandable’ documents is often included in courses on requirements engineering. However, few researchers, particularly within the software engineering domain, have attempted either to define or to understand the nature of comprehension and it’s implications for guidance on the production of quality requirements. In contrast, this paper examines thoroughly the nature of textual comprehension, drawing heavily from research in discourse process, and suggests some implications for requirements (and other) software documentation. In essence, we find that the guidance on writing requirements, often prevalent within software engineering, may be based upon assumptions which are an oversimplification of the nature of comprehension. Furthermore, that these assumptions may lead to rules which detract from the quality of the requirements document and, thus, the understanding gained by the reader. Finally the paper suggests lessons learned which may be useful in formulating future guidance for the production of requirements documentation

Using NLP to build the hypertextuel network of a back-of-the-book index

Relying on the idea that back-of-the-book indexes are traditional devices for navigation through large documents, we have developed a method to build a hypertextual network that helps the navigation in a document. Building such an hypertextual network requires selecting a list of descriptors, identifying the relevant text segments to associate with each descriptor and finally ranking the descriptors and reference segments by relevance order. We propose a specific document segmentation method and a relevance measure for information ranking. The algorithms are tested on 4 corpora (of different types and domains) without human intervention or any semantic knowledge

What is Conceptual Engineering and What Should it Be?

Conceptual engineering is the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts. Conceptual engineering includes or should include de novo conceptual engineering (designing a new concept) as well as conceptual re-engineering (fixing an old concept). It should also include heteronymous (different-word) as well as homonymous (same-word) conceptual engineering. I discuss the importance and the difficulty of these sorts of conceptual engineering in philosophy and elsewhere

Effects of sustained communication time on reliability of JXTA-Overlay P2P platform: a comparison study for two fuzzy-based systems

(c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.In P2P systems, each peer has to obtain information of other peers and propagate the information to other peers through neighboring peers. Thus, it is important for each peer to have some number of neighbor peers. Moreover, it is more significant to discuss if each peer has reliable neighbor peers. In reality, each peer might be faulty or might send obsolete, even incorrect information to the other peers. We have implemented a P2P platform called JXTA-Orverlay, which defines a set of protocols that standardize how different devices may communicate and collaborate among them. JXTA-Overlay provides a set of basic functionalities, primitives, intended to be as complete as possible to satisfy the needs of most JXTA-based applications. In this paper, we present two fuzzy-based systems (called FPRS1 and FPRS2) to improve the reliability of JXTA-Overlay P2P platform. We make a comparison study between the fuzzy-based reliability systems. Comparing the complexity of FPRS1 and FPRS2, the FPRS2 is more complex than FPRS1. However, it considers also the sustained communication time which makes the platform more reliable.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Internet delivery of time-synchronised multimedia: the SCOTS projects

The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) Project at Glasgow University aims to make available over the Internet a 4 million-word multimedia corpus of texts in the languages of Scotland. Twenty percent of this final total will comprise spoken language, in a combination of audio and video material. Versions of SCOTS have been accessible on the Internet since November 2004, and regular additions are made to the Corpus as texts are processed and functionality is improved. While the Corpus is a valuable resource for research, our target users also include the general public, and this has important implications for the nature of the Corpus and website. This paper will begin with a general introduction to the SCOTS Project, and in particular to the nature of our data. The main part of the paper will then present the approach taken to spoken texts. Transcriptions are made using Praat (Boersma and Weenink, University of Amsterdam), which produces a time-based transcription and allows for multiple speakers though independent tiers. This output is then processed to produce a turn-based transcription with overlap and non-linguistic noises indicated. As this transcription is synchronised with the source audio/video material it allows users direct access to any particular passage of the recording, possibly based upon a word query. This process and the end result will be demonstrated and discussed. We shall end by considering the value which is added to an Internet-delivered Corpus by these means of treating spoken text. The advantages include the possibility of returning search results from both written texts and multimedia documents; the easy location of the relevant section of the audio file; and the production through Praat of a turn-based orthographic transcription, which is accessible to a general as well as an academic user. These techniques can also be extended to other research requirements, such as the mark-up of gesture in video texts