Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

Deep Learning Framework for Online Interactive Service Recommendation in Iterative Mashup Development

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of service-oriented computing technologies. The boom of Web services increases the selection burden of software developers in developing service-based systems (such as mashups). How to recommend suitable follow-up component services to develop new mashups has become a fundamental problem in service-oriented software engineering. Most of the existing service recommendation approaches are designed for mashup development in the single-round recommendation scenario. It is hard for them to update recommendation results in time according to developers' requirements and behaviors (e.g., instant service selection). To address this issue, we propose a deep-learning-based interactive service recommendation framework named DLISR, which aims to capture the interactions among the target mashup, selected services, and the next service to recommend. Moreover, an attention mechanism is employed in DLISR to weigh selected services when recommending the next service. We also design two separate models for learning interactions from the perspectives of content information and historical invocation information, respectively, as well as a hybrid model called HISR. Experiments on a real-world dataset indicate that HISR outperforms several state-of-the-art service recommendation methods in the online interactive scenario for developing new mashups iteratively.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, and 3 table

FutureTOD: Teaching Future Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue

Pre-trained language models based on general text enable huge success in the NLP scenario. But the intrinsical difference of linguistic patterns between general text and task-oriented dialogues makes existing pre-trained language models less useful in practice. Current dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework and face the challenges of both selecting true positives and hard negatives. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model, FutureTOD, which distills future knowledge to the representation of the previous dialogue context using a self-training framework. Our intuition is that a good dialogue representation both learns local context information and predicts future information. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream dialogue tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, especially the generalization, robustness, and learning discriminative dialogue representations capabilities.Comment: ACL 2023 Main Conferenc

Seen to Unseen: Exploring Compositional Generalization of Multi-Attribute Controllable Dialogue Generation

Existing controllable dialogue generation work focuses on the single-attribute control and lacks generalization capability to out-of-distribution multiple attribute combinations. In this paper, we explore the compositional generalization for multi-attribute controllable dialogue generation where a model can learn from seen attribute values and generalize to unseen combinations. We propose a prompt-based disentangled controllable dialogue generation model, DCG. It learns attribute concept composition by generating attribute-oriented prompt vectors and uses a disentanglement loss to disentangle different attributes for better generalization. Besides, we design a unified reference-free evaluation framework for multiple attributes with different levels of granularities. Experiment results on two benchmarks prove the effectiveness of our method and the evaluation metric.Comment: ACL 2023 Main Conferenc