Formalisation and evaluation of focus theories for requirements elicitation dialogues in natural language

Requirements engineering is an important part of software engineering. It consists in defining the needs of users when building a new system. These needs may be functional, i.e., what service should the system be able to provide, as well as non-functional, i.e., under which constraints should the system operate. Errors in requirements may have disastrous effects in the rest of the software engineering process (Brooks 1995, p.199), since they would lead to the construction of a system of little interest to its users or would require expensive modifications to correct. Because requirements documents may be very large, errors are usually hard to detect manually. Computer support is therefore often beneficial for their analysis. This is made easier if requirements are expressed formally. However, this support must also be adapted to and be usable by people who are expressing their requirements. These people are usually not computer specialists and are not accustomed to use formal languages. It is therefore necessary to help them express their requirements. Numerous approaches, have been suggested as aids to the acquisition of requirements (Reubenstein 1990). Much less attention has been paid to the control of the dialogue taking place between the users and the system whilst using such frameworks (Bubenko et al. 1994). Frameworks for requirements acquisition are not normally accompanied by theories of the types of dialogue which they support. Our ability to develop sophisticated formal frameworks to analyse requirements makes this deficiency more acutely felt, since increases in formality are often accompanied by greater difficulty in understanding and using the frameworks (Robertson et al. 1989).Users write their requirements in more or less natural language. This is then translated into a formal language that can be interpreted by the elicitation module. This module works on the requirements and provide feedback. The translation process is then applied to convert feedback into more or less natural language. Different systems put different emphasis on the parts of that general architecture. Some are very good at natural language interpretation while others put more emphasis on analysing the requirements and providing feedback.Natural language approaches to requirements elicitation, put an emphasis on natural language interpretation (see section 1.2.1). In these approaches, users write their specifica¬ tion in a subset of natural language. The system then translates it into a formal notation. The main benefit provided by these approaches is the improvement in the ease of use of the system: natural language is the main means of communication for human beings and does not need to be learned. However, most of these approaches do not provide a dialogue well suited for the requirements elicitation process. Because they translate the natural lan¬ guage specification into a formal notation but do not provide guidance on how to write the specification in the first place, users are left in charge of writing correct requirements. If a mistake is made while writing the specification, it will simply be translated into the formal notation.In order to actively help users in the process of writing the requirements, the elicit¬ ation system must interact with them. The emphasis, here, is no longer on translating requirements, but on actively extracting them through a dialogue with users. This is useful, since the requirements elicitation process is complex, and offering guidance is a big help for users. Unfortunately, most of the approaches providing guidance expose their formal underlying frameworks directly to users (see section 1.2.2). In order to benefit from the guidance provided, users have to learn the idiosyncrasies of the system they use. The task of providing guidance is complicated by the fact that there are numerous ways of carrying out the requirements elicitation. Very little research has been done on how to organise best the elicitation process to provide effective guidance. An arbitrary choice could be made, but forcing users to adopt a predefined method is usually not possible as it would make the elicitation process very difficult to follow and understand. The system must therefore be able to adapt itself to various elicitation methods. On the other hand, it is necessary for the system to make choices in order to provide active guidance. A "least-commitment" strategy, such as asking users at every choice point what to do next, is not a useful approach (Ferguson et al. 1996).One way of offering guidance without restricting users too much is by communicating with them in natural language, and by using natural language constraints to inform the choices made by the system to select a guidance strategy. These constraints ensure that the system adopts a strategy that will guide users in a natural and understandable manner, by taking into account the current state of the dialogue. In other words, the system takes into account the current state of the specification to help users complete it, but the current state of the dialogue is the principal factor constraining what will be spoken about next. Using such an approach reduces some of the problems discussed above. The specification does not need to be immediately correct as it will be checked and reworked by the system. The formal framework is hidden from users but is still there to ensure the correctness of the specifications. Guidance is continuously offered through dialogue, which is influenced by but does not directly follow the steps of construction of the specification.The natural language constraints we use in this thesis are theories of dialogue coherence, called "focus" theories. They define what can be spoken about next in a dialogue based on what has already been discussed and the subject under discussion. The theories take into account what participants in a dialogue pay attention to and try to ensure that the rest of the dialogue is related to it. The systems tries to help its users define how a research group WWW site should look like. The way the dialogue evolves from discussing the research group, to discussing the site and its associated home page, to discussing the set of publication can quite easily be followed. The use of pronouns helps in making the text fell natural. It would have been difficult to achieve the same result without using focus rules.Other techniques for organising dialogues, such as those based on the intentions under¬ lying the dialogue (Cohen et al. 1990), would require the dialogue manager to know what the elicitation system is trying to achieve and what its plan is. For some elicitation systems, this knowledge may not be available. Similarly, techniques based on the content of the communications exchanged and how they relate, e.g., based on RST (Mann and Thompson 1987), usually require a lot of domain knowledge. They are therefore time-consumming to code. Focus theories require less information from the elicitation module while enabling the dialogue manager to structure the dialogue. However, in some cases, focus theories are not sufficient to organise a dialogue. We use a theory based on speech act (see section 3.4.1) and some ideas from Grice's work on conversation (see section 5.2.1) to deal with these cases. More generally, although we tried to minimise the impact of other theories to study in detail focus theories, it would be interesting to know whether and how we can integrate them with the work presented in this thesis. In particular, the notion of dialog act and its application to dialog grammar could be of interest. General frameworks developped to study various aspects of dialogue, including dialog acts and focus, have started to appear but work is still at an early stage (C-Star Consortium 1998; Allen and Core 1997).Organising a dialogue based on attention requires a lot of domain knowledge in order to know how things mentioned in the dialogue relate to each other. Therefore, the amount of knowledge engineering needed to build natural language applications is also an important issue. We have tried to limit the engineering difficulties by clearly separating the domain knowledge needed by our dialogue manager from its management capabilities, and by provid¬ ing a way of re-using the existing domain knowledge as far as possible. This is done by using rules which enable us to re-use part of the domain knowledge already used by the elicitation module.The contribution of this thesis is therefore the formalisation and evaluation of focus theories for requirements elicitation dialogues in natural language. The main questions we deal with are the following: • Which focus theories should we use? • What are the relations between the constraints imposed by the focus theories and the constraints inherent to the requirements elicitation process? • Does this approach improve the perceived quality of the dialogue between the elicita¬ tion tool and its users?A prototype system has been developed. This system mainly operates in the WWW site design domain. It has also been applied in other domains as an initial demonstration of the range of problems that can be tackled by our approach

Brillouin spectral deconvolution method for centimeter spatial resolution and high-accuracy strain measurement in Brillouin sensors

This paper was published in Optics Letters and is made available as an electronic reprint with the permission of OSA. The paper can be found at the following URL on the OSA website: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=ol-30-7-705. Systematic or multiple reproduction or distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means is prohibited and is subject to penalties under law.Shahraam Afshar V., Xiaoyi Bao, Lufan Zou, and Liang Che

User-System Dialogues and the Notion of Focus

In recent years, the capabilities of knowledge-based systems to communicate with their users have evolved from simple interactions to complex dialogues. With this evolution comes a need to understand what makes a good dialogue. In this paper, we are concerned with dialogue coherence. We review the notion of focus, which partly explains this property, and its use for user-system communication. First, we examine the major theories dealing with this notion. We describe what their contribution is and how they differ. Then, we illustrate the benefits of using the notion of focus and especially the improvement in text coherence. We pay particular attention to how the notion can concretely be implemented. Its integration with other techniques and theories is described. We conclude the paper by pointing out remaining issues in the understanding of the notion of focus. The contribution of this paper is to provide a classification of the theories of focus and to show the improvements they offer in elaborate user-system dialogues.</jats:p

The chemical heterogeneity of lower crustal xenoliths from the Hualalai 1800 Kaupulehu flow

Historically, geochemists have studied radiogenic isotope signatures of mantle-derived basalts, like erupted ocean island basalts (OIBs) or mid-ocean ridge basalts (MORBs), to analyse mantle composition and heterogeneity. Lambart et al.’s (2019) study of the heterogeneity of the depleted upper mantle, found that the isotopic composition of minerals of lower crustal cumulates preserved significantly greater heterogeneity than locally erupted MORBs. Hence the lavas underestimated the true heterogeneity of the original upper mantle source. This project applies Lambart et al.’s (2019) approach to study the heterogeneity of the mantle plume beneath Hualalai, Hawaii. The major element, trace element and isotopic data of lower crustal xenoliths brought to the surface by the 1800 Hualalai eruption were analysed to test whether Hawaiian lower crustal cumulates reveal greater chemical heterogeneity than their corresponding lavas. These samples record primary sample- and crystal-scale compositional variation, revealing greater trace element and isotopic heterogeneity than corresponding basaltic lavas. In line with the theory of Lambart et al. (2019) for cumulates from mid-ocean ridge (MOR) settings, it is hypothesised that this greater heterogeneity is expressed in lower crustal Hawaiian cumulates because the melts from which they formed experience less magma mixing and homogenisation of trace element and isotopic signatures than corresponding lavas. This implies that homogenisation from magma mixing in the crust occurs at both MOR and OIB settings – at least under Hualalai. As a result, new data suggests that previous studies on the Hawaiian mantle plume beneath Hualalai, based on basaltic lavas, may have underestimated its true heterogeneity. These findings, however, show that sampled regions with the most heterogeneous isotopic values do not correspond to regions with the most heterogeneous trace element values, suggesting that the isotopic 87Sr/86Sr heterogeneity is a subtle heterogeneity that is not detectable in the trace element signatures

Cyber Security of the Railway wireless system: detection, decision and Human-in-the-Loop

TRA 2018, 7th Transport Research Arena, Vienne, AUTRICHE, 16-/04/2018 - 19/04/2018The networks used in the Railway domain are usually heterogeneous, not enough protected and not fitted to the usual Cyber Security requirements in terms of sustainability, protection and attack detection. Furthermore, the quick evolution of the telecommunication means, the threats and the sustainability aspects have to be taken into account in order to protect the Railway system. The paper presents the first contributions on Cyber Security for railways that can be divided into three main aspects dealing with the Cyber Security of the wireless part of the railway communication system: detection, decision and Human-in-the-Loop. Part of the work will be devoted to the development of an Open Pluggable Framework (OPF). The OPF is a software framework based on automation principles. It monitors the environment, then some algorithms detect abnormal behaviours, and next, OPF decides which reaction to take and finally apply this action (e.g. an alarm or a reconfiguration). The last part 'human in the loop' aims at answering the questions: what happens if the automatic countermeasures fail and how the driver can cope with the attack consequences. It consists in placing professional drivers and Central Traffic Control operators in a realistic simulator and playing scenarios involving attacks and observing the reactions of the professional drivers. A preliminary methodology is proposed and discussed through a concrete case study

High Spatial and Spectral Resolution Long-Range Sensing Using Brillouin Echoes

While classical configurations have a practical spatial resolution of 1 meter, novel approaches have been demonstrated that can overcome this limit to offer spatial resolutions in the centimetre range, while preserving full measurand accuracy