Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)

Derivation and consistency checking of models in early software product line engineering

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia InformáticaSoftware Product Line Engineering (SPLE) should offer the ability to express the derivation of product-specific assets, while checking for their consistency. The derivation of product-specific assets is possible using general-purpose programming languages in combination with techniques such as conditional compilation and code generation. On the other hand, consistency checking can be achieved through consistency rules in the form of architectural and design guidelines, programming conventions and well-formedness rules. Current approaches present four shortcomings: (1) focus on code derivation only, (2) ignore consistency problems between the variability model and other complementary specification models used in early SPLE, (3) force developers to learn new, difficult to master, languages to encode the derivation of assets, and (4) offer no tool support. This dissertation presents solutions that contribute to tackle these four shortcomings. These solutions are integrated in the approach Derivation and Consistency Checking of models in early SPLE (DCC4SPL) and its corresponding tool support. The two main components of our approach are the Variability Modelling Language for Requirements(VML4RE), a domain-specific language and derivation infrastructure, and the Variability Consistency Checker (VCC), a verification technique and tool. We validate DCC4SPL demonstrating that it is appropriate to find inconsistencies in early SPL model-based specifications and to specify the derivation of product-specific models.European Project AMPLE, contract IST-33710; Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - SFRH/BD/46194/2008

Ami-deu : un cadre sémantique pour des applications adaptables dans des environnements intelligents

Cette thèse vise à étendre l’utilisation de l'Internet des objets (IdO) en facilitant le développement d’applications par des personnes non experts en développement logiciel. La thèse propose une nouvelle approche pour augmenter la sémantique des applications d’IdO et l’implication des experts du domaine dans le développement d’applications sensibles au contexte. Notre approche permet de gérer le contexte changeant de l’environnement et de générer des applications qui s’exécutent dans plusieurs environnements intelligents pour fournir des actions requises dans divers contextes. Notre approche est mise en œuvre dans un cadriciel (AmI-DEU) qui inclut les composants pour le développement d’applications IdO. AmI-DEU intègre les services d’environnement, favorise l’interaction de l’utilisateur et fournit les moyens de représenter le domaine d’application, le profil de l’utilisateur et les intentions de l’utilisateur. Le cadriciel permet la définition d’applications IoT avec une intention d’activité autodécrite qui contient les connaissances requises pour réaliser l’activité. Ensuite, le cadriciel génère Intention as a Context (IaaC), qui comprend une intention d’activité autodécrite avec des connaissances colligées à évaluer pour une meilleure adaptation dans des environnements intelligents. La sémantique de l’AmI-DEU est basée sur celle du ContextAA (Context-Aware Agents) – une plateforme pour fournir une connaissance du contexte dans plusieurs environnements. Le cadriciel effectue une compilation des connaissances par des règles et l'appariement sémantique pour produire des applications IdO autonomes capables de s’exécuter en ContextAA. AmI- DEU inclut également un outil de développement visuel pour le développement et le déploiement rapide d'applications sur ContextAA. L'interface graphique d’AmI-DEU adopte la métaphore du flux avec des aides visuelles pour simplifier le développement d'applications en permettant des définitions de règles étape par étape. Dans le cadre de l’expérimentation, AmI-DEU comprend un banc d’essai pour le développement d’applications IdO. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent une optimisation sémantique potentielle des ressources pour les applications IoT dynamiques dans les maisons intelligentes et les villes intelligentes. Notre approche favorise l'adoption de la technologie pour améliorer le bienêtre et la qualité de vie des personnes. Cette thèse se termine par des orientations de recherche que le cadriciel AmI-DEU dévoile pour réaliser des environnements intelligents omniprésents fournissant des adaptations appropriées pour soutenir les intentions des personnes.Abstract: This thesis aims at expanding the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) by facilitating the development of applications by people who are not experts in software development. The thesis proposes a new approach to augment IoT applications’ semantics and domain expert involvement in context-aware application development. Our approach enables us to manage the changing environment context and generate applications that run in multiple smart environments to provide required actions in diverse settings. Our approach is implemented in a framework (AmI-DEU) that includes the components for IoT application development. AmI- DEU integrates environment services, promotes end-user interaction, and provides the means to represent the application domain, end-user profile, and end-user intentions. The framework enables the definition of IoT applications with a self-described activity intention that contains the required knowledge to achieve the activity. Then, the framework generates Intention as a Context (IaaC), which includes a self-described activity intention with compiled knowledge to be assessed for augmented adaptations in smart environments. AmI-DEU framework semantics adopts ContextAA (Context-Aware Agents) – a platform to provide context-awareness in multiple environments. The framework performs a knowledge compilation by rules and semantic matching to produce autonomic IoT applications to run in ContextAA. AmI-DEU also includes a visual tool for quick application development and deployment to ContextAA. The AmI-DEU GUI adopts the flow metaphor with visual aids to simplify developing applications by allowing step-by-step rule definitions. As part of the experimentation, AmI-DEU includes a testbed for IoT application development. Experimental results show a potential semantic optimization for dynamic IoT applications in smart homes and smart cities. Our approach promotes technology adoption to improve people’s well-being and quality of life. This thesis concludes with research directions that the AmI-DEU framework uncovers to achieve pervasive smart environments providing suitable adaptations to support people’s intentions

Hazard Relation Diagramme - Definition und Evaluation

Der Entwicklungsprozess sicherheitskritischer, software-intensiver eingebetteter Systeme wird im Besonderen durch die Notwendigkeit charakterisiert, zu einem frühestmöglichem Zeitpunkt im Rahmen des Safety Assessments sogenannte Hazards aufzudecken, welche im Betrieb zu Schaden in Form von Tod oder Verletzung von Menschen sowie zu Beschädigung oder Zerstörung externer Systeme führen können. Um die Sicherheit des Systems im Betrieb zu fördern, werden für jeden Hazard sogenannte Mitigationen entwickelt, welche durch hazard-mitigierende Anforderungen im Rahmen des Requirements Engineering dokumentiert werden. Hazard-mitigierende Anforderungen müssen in dem Sinne adäquat sein, dass sie zum einen die von Stakeholdern gewünschte Systemfunktionalität spezifizieren und zum anderen die Wahrscheinlichkeit von Schaden durch Hazards im Betrieb minimieren. Die Adäquatheit von hazard-mitigierenden Anforderungen wird im Entwicklungsprozess im Rahmen der Anforderungsvalidierung bestimmt. Die Validierung von hazard-mitigierenden Anforderungen wird allerdings dadurch erschwert, dass Hazards sowie Kontextinformationen über Hazards ein Arbeitsprodukt des Safety Assessments darstellen und die hazard-mitigierenden Anforderungen ein Arbeitsprodukt des Requirements Engineering sind. Diese beiden Arbeitsprodukte sind in der Regel nicht schlecht integriert, sodass den Stakeholdern bei der Validierung nicht alle Informationen zur Verfügung stehen, die zur Bestimmung der Adäquatheit der hazard-mitigierenden Anforderungen notwendig sind. In Folge könnte es dazu kommen, dass Inadäquatheit in hazard-mitigierenden Anforderungen nicht aufgedeckt wird und das System fälschlicherweise als ausreichend sicher betrachtet wird. Im Rahmen dieses Dissertationsvorhabens wurde ein Ansatz entwickelt, welcher Hazards, Kontextinformationen zu Hazards, hazard-mitigierende Anforderungen sowie die spezifischen Abhängigkeiten in einem graphischen Modell visualisiert und somit für die Validierung zugänglich macht. Zudem wird ein automatisierter Ansatz zur Generierung der graphischen Modelle vorgestellt und prototypisch implementiert. Darüber hinaus wird anhand von vier detaillierten empirischen Experimenten der Nutzen der graphischen Modelle für die Validierung hazard-mitigierender Anforderungen nachgewiesen. Die vorliegende Arbeit leistet somit einen Beitrag zur Integration der Arbeitsergebnisse des Safety Assessments und des Requirements Engineerings mit dem Ziel die Validierung der Adäquatheit hazard-mitigierender Anforderungen zu unterstützen.The development process of safety-critical, software-intensive embedded systems is characterized by the need to identify hazards during safety assessment in early stages of development. During operation, such hazards may lead to harm to come to humans and external systems in the form of death, injury, damage, or destruction, respectively. In order to improve the safety of the system during operation, mitigations are conceived for each hazard, and documented during requirements engineering by means of hazard-mitigating requirements. These hazard-mitigating requirements must be adequate in the sense that they must specify the functionality required by the stakeholders and must render the system sufficiently safe during operation with regard to the identified hazards. The adequacy of hazard-mitigating requirements is determined during requirements validation. Yet, the validation of the adequacy of hazard-mitigating requirements is burdened by the fact that hazards and contextual information about hazards are a work product of safety assessment and hazard-mitigating requirements are a work product of requirements engineering. These work products are poorly integrated such that the information needed to determine the adequacy of hazard-mitigating requirements are not available to stakeholders during validation. In consequence, there is the risk that inadequate hazard-mitigating requirements remain covert and the system is falsely considered sufficiently safe. In this dissertation, an approach was developed, which visualizes hazards, contextual information about hazards, hazard-mitigating requirements, as well as their specific dependencies in graphical models. The approach hence renders these information accessible to stakeholders during validation. In addition, an approach to create these graphical models was developed and prototypically implemented. Moreover, the benefits of using these graphical models during validation of hazard-mitigating requirements was investigated and established by means of four detailed empirical experiments. The dissertation at hand hence provides a contribution towards the integration of the work products of safety assessment and requirements engineering with the purpose to support the validation of the adequacy of hazard-mitigating requirements

Searching for commonsense

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-101).Acquiring and representing the large body of "common sense" knowledge underlying ordinary human reasoning and communication is a long standing problem in the field of artificial intelligence. This thesis will address the question whether a significant quantity of this knowledge may be acquired by mining natural language content on the Web. Specifically, this thesis emphasizes the representation of knowledge in the form of binary semantic relationships, such as cause, effect, intent, and time, among natural language phrases. The central hypothesis is that seed knowledge collected from volunteers enables automated acquisition of this knowledge from a large, unannotated, general corpus like the Web. A text mining system, ConceptMiner, was developed to evaluate this hypothesis. ConceptMiner leverages web search engines, Information Extraction techniques and the ConceptNet toolkit to analyze Web content for textual evidence indicating common sense relationships.(cont.) Experiments are reported for three semantic relation classes: desire, effect, and capability. A Pointwise Mutual Infomation measure computed from Web hit counts is demonstrated to filter general common sense from instance knowledge true only in specific circumstances. A semantic distance metric is introduced which significantly reduces negative instances from the extracted hypotheses. The results confirm that significant relational common sense knowledge exists on the Web and provides evidence that the algorithms employed by ConceptMiner can extract this knowledge with a precision approaching that provided by human subjects.by Ian Scott Eslick.S.M

Using Natural Language as Knowledge Representation in an Intelligent Tutoring System

Knowledge used in an intelligent tutoring system to teach students is usually acquired from authors who are experts in the domain. A problem is that they cannot directly add and update knowledge if they don’t learn formal language used in the system. Using natural language to represent knowledge can allow authors to update knowledge easily. This thesis presents a new approach to use unconstrained natural language as knowledge representation for a physics tutoring system so that non-programmers can add knowledge without learning a new knowledge representation. This approach allows domain experts to add not only problem statements, but also background knowledge such as commonsense and domain knowledge including principles in natural language. Rather than translating into a formal language, natural language representation is directly used in inference so that domain experts can understand the internal process, detect knowledge bugs, and revise the knowledgebase easily. In authoring task studies with the new system based on this approach, it was shown that the size of added knowledge was small enough for a domain expert to add, and converged to near zero as more problems were added in one mental model test. After entering the no-new-knowledge state in the test, 5 out of 13 problems (38 percent) were automatically solved by the system without adding new knowledge