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

Canary in a Coal Mine: Impact of Mid-20th Century Air Pollution on Infant Mortality and Property Values *

Abstract This paper uses the mid-20th century expansion in U.S. coal-fired electricity generation to study the local impact of air pollution on infant mortality and housing prices. The empirical analysis exploits the timing of coal-fired power plant openings and annual variation in plantlevel coal consumption in the U.S. from 1938 to 1962. The estimates suggest that the rise in power plant coal consumption was responsible for an additional 3,500 infant deaths per year by the end of the sample period. We examine whether individuals perceived these health costs. Although hedonic estimates of the average marginal willingness to pay for clean air are close to zero, there is substantial heterogeneity in the housing market response. At low levels of electricity access, expansions in coal-fired electricity generation have positive effects on housing prices. At high levels of electricity access, this relationship is negative. These results suggest that households traded off the pollution costs of coal-fired power against the benefits of low-cost electricity. * We than

AbstFinder, a prototype natural language text abstraction finder for use in requirements elicitation

Abstract. Abstraction identification is named as a key problem in requirements analysis. Typically, the abstractions must be found among the large mass of natural language text collected from the clients and users. This paper motivates and describes a new approach, based on traditional signal processing methods, for finding abstractions in natural language text and offers a new tool, AbstFinder as an implementation of this approach. The advantages and disadvantages of the approach and the design of the tool are discussed in detail. Various scenarios for use of the tool are offered. Some of these scenarios were used in case study of the effectiveness of the tool on an industrial-strength example of finding abstractions in a request for proposals

Developing an Integrative Platform for Cancer Research: a Requirements Engineering Perspective

The NCRI Informatics Initiative has been established with the goal of using informatics to maximise the impact of cancer research. A clear foundation to achieving this goal is to enable the development of an informatics platform in the UK that facilitates access to, and movement of, data generated from research funded by NCRI Partner organisations, across the spectrum from genomics to clinical trials. To assure the success of such a system, an initial project has been defined to establish and document the requirements for the platform and to construct and validate the key information models around which the platform will be built. The platform will need to leverage many projects, tools and resources including those generated by many e-Science projects. It also required contributing to the development of a global platform through a close interaction with similar efforts being developed by the NCI in the USA. This paper recounts our experience in analysing the requirements for the platform, and explains the customised analysis approach and techniques utilised in the project. 1