174,743 research outputs found
Supporting process model validation through natural language generation
The design and development of process-aware information systems is often supported by specifying requirements as business process models. Although this approach is generally accepted as an effective strategy, it remains a fundamental challenge to adequately validate these models given the diverging skill set of domain experts and system analysts. As domain experts often do not feel confident in judging the correctness and completeness of process models that system analysts create, the validation often has to regress to a discourse using natural language. In order to support such a discourse appropriately, so-called verbalization techniques have been defined for different types of conceptual models. However, there is currently no sophisticated technique available that is capable of generating natural-looking text from process models. In this paper, we address this research gap and propose a technique for generating natural language texts from business process models. A comparison with manually created process descriptions demonstrates that the generated texts are superior in terms of completeness, structure, and linguistic complexity. An evaluation with users further demonstrates that the texts are very understandable and effectively allow the reader to infer the process model semantics. Hence, the generated texts represent a useful input for process model validation
Supporting Process Model Validation through Natural Language Generation
Abstract—The design and development of process-aware information systems is often supported by specifying requirements as business process models. Although this approach is generally accepted as an effective strategy, it remains a fundamental challenge to adequately validate these models given the diverging skill set of domain experts and system analysts. As domain experts often do not feel confident in judging the correctness and completeness of process models that system analysts create, the validation often has to regress to a discourse using natural language. In order to support such a discourse appropriately, so-called verbalization techniques have been defined for different types of conceptual models. However, there is currently no sophisticated technique available that is capable of generating natural-looking text from process models. In this paper, we address this research gap and propose a technique for generating natural language texts from business process models. A comparison with manually created process descriptions demonstrates that the generated texts are superior in terms of completeness, structure, and linguistic complexity. An evaluation with users further demonstrates that the texts are very understandable and effectively allow the reader to infer the process model semantics. Hence, the generated texts represent a useful input for process model validation
Shingle 2.0: generalising self-consistent and automated domain discretisation for multi-scale geophysical models
The approaches taken to describe and develop spatial discretisations of the
domains required for geophysical simulation models are commonly ad hoc, model
or application specific and under-documented. This is particularly acute for
simulation models that are flexible in their use of multi-scale, anisotropic,
fully unstructured meshes where a relatively large number of heterogeneous
parameters are required to constrain their full description. As a consequence,
it can be difficult to reproduce simulations, ensure a provenance in model data
handling and initialisation, and a challenge to conduct model intercomparisons
rigorously. This paper takes a novel approach to spatial discretisation,
considering it much like a numerical simulation model problem of its own. It
introduces a generalised, extensible, self-documenting approach to carefully
describe, and necessarily fully, the constraints over the heterogeneous
parameter space that determine how a domain is spatially discretised. This
additionally provides a method to accurately record these constraints, using
high-level natural language based abstractions, that enables full accounts of
provenance, sharing and distribution. Together with this description, a
generalised consistent approach to unstructured mesh generation for geophysical
models is developed, that is automated, robust and repeatable, quick-to-draft,
rigorously verified and consistent to the source data throughout. This
interprets the description above to execute a self-consistent spatial
discretisation process, which is automatically validated to expected discrete
characteristics and metrics.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Submitted for publication and under
revie
Interpretation of Natural Language Rules in Conversational Machine Reading
Most work in machine reading focuses on question answering problems where the
answer is directly expressed in the text to read. However, many real-world
question answering problems require the reading of text not because it contains
the literal answer, but because it contains a recipe to derive an answer
together with the reader's background knowledge. One example is the task of
interpreting regulations to answer "Can I...?" or "Do I have to...?" questions
such as "I am working in Canada. Do I have to carry on paying UK National
Insurance?" after reading a UK government website about this topic. This task
requires both the interpretation of rules and the application of background
knowledge. It is further complicated due to the fact that, in practice, most
questions are underspecified, and a human assistant will regularly have to ask
clarification questions such as "How long have you been working abroad?" when
the answer cannot be directly derived from the question and text. In this
paper, we formalise this task and develop a crowd-sourcing strategy to collect
32k task instances based on real-world rules and crowd-generated questions and
scenarios. We analyse the challenges of this task and assess its difficulty by
evaluating the performance of rule-based and machine-learning baselines. We
observe promising results when no background knowledge is necessary, and
substantial room for improvement whenever background knowledge is needed.Comment: EMNLP 201
Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern
software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user
base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software
development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific
challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from
developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a
program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we
reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems
in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help
guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we
provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18
A Neural Model for Generating Natural Language Summaries of Program Subroutines
Source code summarization -- creating natural language descriptions of source
code behavior -- is a rapidly-growing research topic with applications to
automatic documentation generation, program comprehension, and software
maintenance. Traditional techniques relied on heuristics and templates built
manually by human experts. Recently, data-driven approaches based on neural
machine translation have largely overtaken template-based systems. But nearly
all of these techniques rely almost entirely on programs having good internal
documentation; without clear identifier names, the models fail to create good
summaries. In this paper, we present a neural model that combines words from
code with code structure from an AST. Unlike previous approaches, our model
processes each data source as a separate input, which allows the model to learn
code structure independent of the text in code. This process helps our approach
provide coherent summaries in many cases even when zero internal documentation
is provided. We evaluate our technique with a dataset we created from 2.1m Java
methods. We find improvement over two baseline techniques from SE literature
and one from NLP literature
A Model-Driven approach for functional test case generation
Test phase is one of the most critical phases in software engineering life cycle to assure the final system quality. In this context, functional system test cases verify that the system under test fulfills its functional specification. Thus, these test cases are frequently designed from the different scenarios and alternatives depicted in functional requirements. The objective of this paper is to introduce a systematic process based on the Model-Driven paradigm to automate the generation of functional test cases from functional requirements. For this aim, a set of metamodels and transformations and also a specific language domain to use them is presented. The paper finishes stating learned lessons from the trenches as well as relevant future work and conclusions that draw new research lines in the test cases generation context.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-
Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments
Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement
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