Related papers: How Do Practitioners Interpret Conditionals in Req…
Requirements Engineering (RE)-related activities require high collaboration between various roles in software engineering (SE), such as requirements engineers, stakeholders, developers, etc. Their demographics, views, understanding of…
This paper describes how motivational models can be used to cross check agile requirements artifacts to improve consistency and completeness of software requirements. Motivational models provide a high level understanding of the purposes of…
Natural language reasoning plays an increasingly important role in improving language models' ability to solve complex language understanding tasks. An interesting use case for reasoning is the resolution of context-dependent ambiguity. But…
The purpose of requirements engineering (RE) is to make sure that the expectations and needs of the stakeholders of a software system are met. Emotional needs can be captured as emotional requirements that represent how the end user should…
Software model checking, as an undecidable problem, has three possible outcomes: (1) the program satisfies the specification, (2) the program does not satisfy the specification, and (3) the model checker fails. The third outcome usually…
Precondition inference is a non-trivial problem with important applications in program analysis and verification. We present a novel iterative method for automatically deriving preconditions for the safety and unsafety of programs. Each…
The reference point for developing any artefact is its specification; to develop software formally, a formal specification is required. For sequential programs, pre and post conditions (together with abstract objects) suffice; rely and…
The requirements elicited from stakeholders suffer from various afflictions, including informality, incompleteness, ambiguity, vagueness, inconsistencies, and more. It is the task of requirements engineering (RE) processes to derive from…
This paper presents a qualitative study that investigates the effects of some language choices in expressing the trigger part of a trigger-action rule on the users' mental models. Specifically, we explored how 11 non-programmer participants…
Some questions have multiple answers that are not equally correct, i.e. answers are different under different conditions. Conditions are used to distinguish answers as well as to provide additional information to support them. In this…
Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this…
We study abductive, causal, and non-causal conditionals in indicative and counterfactual formulations using probabilistic truth table tasks under incomplete probabilistic knowledge (N = 80). We frame the task as a probability-logical…
Deriving acceptance tests from high-level, natural language requirements that achieve full coverage is a major manual challenge at the interface between requirements engineering and testing. Conditional requirements (e.g., "If A or B then…
Software systems usually operate in a dynamic context where their requirements change continuously and new requirements emerge frequently. A single requirement hardly exists in isolation: it is related to other requirements and to the…
In this paper, we discuss necessary and sufficient explanations for formal argumentation - the question whether and why a certain argument can be accepted (or not) under various extension-based semantics. Given a framework with which…
Program synthesis techniques construct or infer programs from user-provided specifications, such as input-output examples. Yet most specifications, especially those given by end-users, leave the synthesis problem radically ill-posed,…
It is commonly accepted that the quality of requirements specifications impacts subsequent software engineering activities. However, we still lack empirical evidence to support organizations in deciding whether their requirements are good…
Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have become ubiquitous. Although they offer a wide range of benefits, their adoption in decision-critical fields is limited by their lack of interpretability, particularly with textual…
The paper proposes a fresh look at the concept of goal and advances that motivational attitudes like desire, goal and intention are just facets of the broader notion of (acceptable) outcome. We propose to encode the preferences of an agent…
The need for systems to explain behavior to users has become more evident with the rise of complex technology like machine learning or self-adaptation. In general, the need for an explanation arises when the behavior of a system does not…