SE4AI issues on social media agent design with use cases

This paper is the result of an endeavor of specifying a social media agent through Use Case 2.0 (the “agile Use Case”). That what was expected to be a straightforward specification task revealed issues that subverts a critical foundation of the Use Case conception, nonexistent use-case between the SuD and the actor, yielding to the extensions proposed in this paper.This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020

Structural onomatology for username generation: A partial account

The username hints for most of the on-line social networks are mostly unpleasant for human beings since they are mostly a simple name variation followed by numbers. This paper shows that it is possible to generate human likable usernames through heuristics guided by structural onomastics. The objective then is to conceive heuristics as such and check its availability in Twitter in order to verify if is it possible to generate a sufficiently big and available username data-set that is able to justify the transitions from unpleasant to a pleasant username suggestion. This paper finds that it is possible to generate 8281 handles on average through the proposed heuristics and their permutations, therefore, the number of various possibilities is comfortable. This is a partial account since not all possibilities were explored and some improvements are required, but suits for a proof of concept and to indicate paths.FCT Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the RD Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/202

Large language models: compilers for the 4th generation of programming languages?

This paper explores the possibility of large language models as a fourth generation programming language compiler. This is based on the idea that large language models are able to translate a natural language specification into a program written in a particular programming language. In other words, just as high-level languages provided an additional language abstraction to assembly code, large language models can provide an additional language abstraction to high-level languages. This interpretation allows large language models to be thought of through the lens of compiler theory, leading to insightful conclusions.FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(UIDB/00319/2020

An exploratory design science research on troll factories

Private and military troll factories (facilities used to spread rumours in online social media) are currently proliferating around the world. By their very nature, they are obscure companies whose internal workings are largely unknown, apart from leaks to the press. They are even more concealed when it comes to their underlying technology. At least in a broad sense, it is believed that there are two main tasks performed by a troll factory: sowing and spreading. The first is to create and, more importantly, maintain a social network that can be used for the spreading task. It is then a wicked long-term activity, subject to all sorts of problems. As an attempt to make this perspective a little clearer, this paper uses exploratory design science research to produce artefacts that could be applied to online rumour spreading in social media. Then, as a hypothesis: it is possible to design a fully automated social media agent capable of sowing a social network on microblogging platforms. The expectation is that it will be possible to identify common opportunities and difficulties in the development of such tools, which in turn will allow an evaluation of the technology, but above all the level of automation of these facilities. The research is based on a general domain Twitter corpus with 4M+ tokens and on ChatGPT, and discusses both knowledge-based and deep learning approaches for smooth tweet generation. These explorations suggest that for the current, widespread and publicly available NLP technology, troll factories work like a call centre; i.e. humans assisted by more or less sophisticated computing tools (often called cyborgs).FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(2022.06822