Related papers: Notions of Equivalence in Software Design
The language for expressing comparisons is often complex and nuanced, making supporting natural language-based visual comparison a non-trivial task. To better understand how people reason about comparisons in natural language, we explore a…
Formal semantics provides rigorous, mathematically precise definitions of programming languages, with which we can argue about program behaviour and program equivalence by formal means; in particular, we can describe and verify our…
Formal software specification is known to enable early error detection and explicit invariants, yet it has seen limited industrial adoption due to its high notation overhead and the expertise required to use traditional formal languages.…
Interactive proof assistants are computer programs carefully constructed to check a human-designed proof of a mathematical claim with high confidence in the implementation. However, this only validates truth of a formal claim, which may…
A major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, which should be both understandable and precise. Most requirements are written in natural language, good for understandability but lacking in…
The multiplicity of software projects' stakeholders and activities leads to the multiplicity of software specification views and thus creates the need to establish mutual consistency between them. The process of establishing such…
When are two algorithms the same? How can we be sure a recently proposed algorithm is novel, and not a minor variation on an existing method? In this paper, we present a framework for reasoning about equivalence between a broad class of…
When are two algorithms the same? How can we be sure a recently proposed algorithm is novel, and not a minor twist on an existing method? In this paper, we present a framework for reasoning about equivalence between a broad class of…
We develop methods to formally describe and compare games, in order to probe questions of game structure and design, and as a stepping stone to predicting player behavior from design patterns. We define a grammar-like formalism to describe…
In order to work with mathematical content in computer systems, it is necessary to represent it in formal languages. Ideally, these are supported by tools that verify the correctness of the content, allow computing with it, and produce…
Formal languages are essential for computer programming and are constructed to be easily processed by computers. In contrast, natural languages are much more challenging and instigated the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). One…
It is well understood that classification algorithms, for example, for deciding on loan applications, cannot be evaluated for fairness without taking context into account. We examine what can be learned from a fairness oracle equipped with…
Program code contains functions, variables, and data structures that are represented by names. To promote human understanding, these names should describe the role and use of the code elements they represent. But the names given by…
We consider the problem of evaluating, and comparing computational policies in the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), which has become the de facto standard for governing the access and usage of digital resources. Although preliminary…
Logic programming under the answer-set semantics nowadays deals with numerous different notions of program equivalence. This is due to the fact that equivalence for substitution (known as strong equivalence) and ordinary equivalence are…
People usually regard algorithms as more abstract than the programs that implement them. The natural way to formalize this idea is that algorithms are equivalence classes of programs with respect to a suitable equivalence relation. We argue…
The oracle model of computation is believed to allow a rigorous proof of quantum over classical computational superiority. Since quantum and classical oracles are essentially different, a correspondence principle is commonly implicitly used…
"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
Word sense disambiguation is a fundamental challenge in natural language understanding. Current methods are primarily aimed at coarse-grained representations (e.g. WordNet synsets or FrameNet frames) and require hand-annotated training data…