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A growing number of empirical software engineering researchers suggest that a complementary focus on theory is required if the discipline is to mature. A first step in theory-building involves the establishment of suitable theoretical…
Language models learn and represent language differently than humans; they learn the form and not the meaning. Thus, to assess the success of language model explainability, we need to consider the impact of its divergence from a user's…
A new generation of AI models generates step-by-step reasoning text before producing an answer. This text appears to offer a human-readable window into their computation process, and is increasingly relied upon for transparency and…
Before implementing a function, programmers are encouraged to write a purpose statement i.e., a short, natural-language explanation of what the function computes. A purpose statement may be ambiguous i.e., it may fail to specify the…
Traditionally, practitioners use formal methods pre-dominately for one half of the quality-assurance process: verification (do we build the software right?). The other half -- validation (do we build the right software?) -- has been given…
Government development projects vary significantly from private sector initiatives in scope, stakeholder complexity, and regulatory requirements. There is a lack of empirical studies focusing on requirements engineering (RE) activities…
Recent authors have proposed analyzing conditional reasoning through a notion of intervention on a simulation program, and have found a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic of conditionals in this setting. Here we extend this…
Software architecture knowledge transfer is essential for software development, but related documentation is often incomplete or ambiguous, making oral explanations a common means. Our broader aim is to explore how such explanations might…
Adding explanations to recommender systems is said to have multiple benefits, such as increasing user trust or system transparency. Previous work from other application areas suggests that specific user characteristics impact the users'…
Satisfiability solving is a common technique for formal verification forming the basis of many proof and model checking systems. Failure to show a proof obligation will produce a counterexample or failure trace with typically many thousands…
Verification activities are necessary to ensure that the requirements are specified in a correct way. However, until now requirements verification research has focused on traditional up-front requirements. Agile or just-in-time requirements…
With the recent proliferation of artificial intelligence systems, there has been a surge in the demand for explainability of these systems. Explanations help to reduce system opacity, support transparency, and increase stakeholder trust. In…
The problem of writing a specification which accurately reflects the intent of the developer has long been recognized as fundamental. We propose a method and a supporting tool to write and check a specification and an implementation using a…
The study of causal relationships between emotions and causes in texts has recently received much attention. Most works focus on extracting causally related clauses from documents. However, none of these works has considered that the causal…
This work was intended to be an attempt to introduce the meta-language for working with multiple-conclusion inference rules that admit asserted propositions along with the rejected propositions. The presence of rejected propositions, and…
Context] Problems in Requirements Engineering (RE) can lead to serious consequences during the software development lifecycle. [Goal] The goal of this paper is to propose empirically-based guidelines that can be used by different types of…
While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…
Requirements are elicited from the customer and other stakeholders through an iterative process of interviews, prototyping, and other interactive sessions. Then, requirements can be further extended, based on the analysis of the features of…
Background: Causal relations in natural language (NL) requirements convey strong, semantic information. Automatically extracting such causal information enables multiple use cases, such as test case generation, but it also requires to…
When applicants get rejected by an algorithmic decision system, recourse explanations provide actionable suggestions for how to change their input features to get a positive evaluation. A crucial yet overlooked phenomenon is that recourse…