The REVERE project:Experiments with the application of probabilistic NLP to systems engineering

Despite natural language’s well-documented shortcomings as a medium for precise technical description, its use in software-intensive systems engineering remains inescapable. This poses many problems for engineers who must derive problem understanding and synthesise precise solution descriptions from free text. This is true both for the largely unstructured textual descriptions from which system requirements are derived, and for more formal documents, such as standards, which impose requirements on system development processes. This paper describes experiments that we have carried out in the REVERE1 project to investigate the use of probabilistic natural language processing techniques to provide systems engineering support

Rhetoric in standard setting : the case of the going-concern audit

This paper seeks to explore in depth the ways in which the rhetoric of the standard setter responds to comments received during development of a standard. Previous research has explored the use of rhetorical strategies in accounting standards to construct and persuade as to what is 'good' and to silence potential criticisms and alternative proposals. The exploration is extended to the development of an auditing standard and is strengthened by relating the opinions of lobbyists to the rhetoric used in the response. The analysis shows that, in a situation where the standard setter's position changed significantly during the exposure of proposals to comment, rhetorical strategies in the exposure draft or standard were adapted to match the changing direction of persuasion, with silencing of potential counter-argument evidenced in the surrounding explanatory material. Research implications/limitations - The research demonstrates that those using standards should be aware of the normative nature of these documents and the subjectivity inherent in the nature of the text. The paper builds on Young's 2003 paper by exploring the dynamics of the ways in which the rhetoric of the standard setter responds to comment during the consultation process

Proceedings of the Workshop Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation (SCAR) 2007

This is the proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation, held in conjunction with NODALIDA 2007, on May 24 2007 in Tartu, Estonia.</p