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Conditional acceptability refers to how plausible a conditional statement is perceived to be. It plays an important role in communication and reasoning, as it influences how individuals interpret implications, assess arguments, and make…
The quality of rationales is essential in the reasoning capabilities of language models. Rationales not only enhance reasoning performance in complex natural language tasks but also justify model decisions. However, obtaining impeccable…
[Context and Motivation]: The quality of requirements specifications impacts subsequent, dependent software engineering activities. Requirements quality defects like ambiguous statements can result in incomplete or wrong features and even…
Context: Software specifications are usually written in natural language and may suffer from imprecision, ambiguity, and other quality issues, called thereafter, requirement smells. Requirement smells can hinder the development of a project…
The traditional understanding of stakeholders requirements is that they express desirable relationships among phenomena in the relevant environment. Historically, software engineering research has tended to focus more on the problems of…
Explanations are essential in software engineering (SE) and requirements communication, helping stakeholders clarify ambiguities, justify design choices, and build shared understanding. Online Q&A forums such as Stack Overflow provide…
It is widely accepted that understanding system requirements is important for software development project success. However, this paper presents two novel challenges to the requirements concept. First, where many plausible approaches to…
Out of a personal puzzlement, recent peer review comments, and demonstrable confusion in the existing literature, the paper presents a rapid review of the concept of legal requirements (LRs) in requirements engineering (RE) research.…
Conditionals are useful for modelling, but are not always sufficiently expressive for capturing information accurately. In this paper we make the case for a form of conditional that is situation-based. These conditionals are more expressive…
Early stages of system development involve outlining desired features such as functionality, availability, or usability. Specifications are derived from these features that concretize vague ideas presented in natural languages. The…
We propose analyzing conditional reasoning by appeal to a notion of intervention on a simulation program, formalizing and subsuming a number of approaches to conditional thinking in the recent AI literature. Our main results include a…
Background: Requirements Changes (RCs) -- the additions/modifications/deletions of functional/non-functional requirements in software products -- are challenging for software practitioners to handle. Handling some changes may significantly…
This paper explores the challenges of constructing suitable inferential models in scenarios where the parameter of interest is determined in light of the data, such as regression after variable selection. Two compelling arguments for…
Context and Motivation: Natural language is the most common form to specify requirements in industry. The quality of the specification depends on the capability of the writer to formulate requirements aimed at different stakeholders: they…
Requirements are informal and semi-formal descriptions of the expected behavior of a system. They are usually expressed in the form of natural language sentences and checked for errors manually, e.g., by peer reviews. Manual checks are…
Safety and assurance standards often rely on the principle that requirements errors can be minimised by expressing the requirements more formally. Although numerous case studies have shown that the act of formalising previously informal…
In Requirements Engineering, requirements elicitation aims the acquisition of information from the stakeholders of a system-to-be. An important task during elicitation is to identify and render explicit the stakeholders' implicit…
Contextual refinement (CR) is one of the standard notions of specifying open programs. CR has two main advantages: (i) (horizontal and vertical) compositionality that allows us to decompose a large contextual refinement into many smaller…
A growing number of researchers suggest that software process must be tailored to a project's context to achieve maximal performance. Researchers have studied 'context' in an ad-hoc way, with focus on those contextual factors that appear to…
All scientific interpretations of statistical outputs depend on background (auxiliary) assumptions that are rarely delineated or explicitly interrogated. These include not only the usual modeling assumptions, but also deeper assumptions…