Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:57:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo3220_1.pdf: 1307302 bytes, checksum: 42435c33fd14be36778e3c202d24fd2d (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / A maioria das empresas utiliza a linguagem natural livre para documentar software, desde os seus requisitos, até os casos de uso e testes usados para verificar o produto final. Visto que as fases de análise, projeto, implementação e teste do sistema dependem essencialmente dessa documentação, é preciso assegurar inicialmente a qualidade desses textos. Contudo, textos escritos em linguagem natural nem sempre são precisos, devido ao fenômeno da ambigüidade (léxica e estrutural), podendo dar margem a diferentes interpretações. Uma alternativa para se minimizar esse problema é o uso de uma Linguagem Natural Controlada - um subconjunto de alguma língua natural, que usa um vocabulário restrito a um domínio particular, e regras gramaticais que guiam a construção de sentenças com redução de ambigüidade semântica visando padronização e precisão dos textos. Este trabalho, na área de Teste de Software, apresenta a ucsCNL (Use Case Specification CNL), uma Linguagem Natural Controlada para escrever especificações de casos de uso no domínio de dispositivos móveis. A ucsCNL foi integrada à TaRGeT (Test and Requirements Generation Tool), uma ferramenta para geração automática de casos de teste funcionais baseados em cenários de casos de uso escritos em Inglês. A ucsCNL provê um ambiente para geração de casos de teste mais claros, com ambigüidade reduzida, influindo diretamente na qualidade dos testes e na produtividade dos testadores. A ucsCNL já está em uso e tem alcançado resultados satisfatórios

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / This paper describes a method in which users realize the benefits of a standards-based method for capturing and evaluating verification and validation (V&V) rules within and across metadata instance documents. The method uses a natural language based syntax for the T&E metadata V&V rule set in order to abstract the highly technical rule languages to a domain-specific syntax. As a result, the domain expert can easily specify, validate and manage the specification and validation of the rules themselves. Our approach is very flexible in that under the hood, the method automatically translates rules to a host of target rule languages. We validated our method in a multi-vendor scenario involving Metadata Description Language (MDL) and Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) instance documents, user constraints, and domain constraints. The rules are captured in natural language, and used to perform V&V within a single metadata instance document and across multiple metadata instance documents.

Cette thèse porte sur la transformation automatique et sémantique de règles métiers en des règles formelles. Ces règles métiers sont originellement rédigées sous la forme de textes en langage naturel, de tableaux et d'images. L'objectif est de mettre à la disposition des experts métiers, un ensemble de services leur permettant d'élaborer des corpus de règles métiers formelles. Le domaine de la Construction est le champ d'application de ces travaux. Disposer d'une version formelle et exécutable de ces règles métiers servira à effectuer des contrôles de conformité automatique sur les maquettes numériques des projets de construction en cours de conception.Pour cela, nous avons mis à disposition des experts métiers les deux principales contributions de cette thèse. La première est la mise sur pied d'un langage naturel contrôlé, dénommé RAINS. Il permet aux experts métiers de réécrire les règles métiers sous la forme de règles formelles. Les règles RAINS se composent de termes du vocabulaire métier et de mots réservés tels que les fonctions de comparaisons, les marques de négation et de quantification universelle et les littéraux. Chaque règle RAINS a une sémantique formelle unique qui s'appuie sur les standards du web sémantique. La seconde contribution majeure est un service de formalisation des règles métiers. Ce service implémente une approche de formalisation proposée dans le cadre de cette thèse et dénommée FORSA. Ce service propose des versions RAINS des règles métiers en langage naturel qui lui sont soumises. FORSA fait appel à des outils du traitement automatique du langage naturel et à des heuristiques. Pour évaluer FORSA, nous avons mis sur pied un benchmark adapté à la tâche de formalisation des règles métiers. Les données de ce benchmark sont issues de normes du domaine de la Construction / This thesis focuses on automatic and semantic transformation of business rules into formal rules. These business rules are originally drafted in the form of natural language text, tables and images. Our goal is to provide to business experts a set of services allowing them to develop corpora of formal business rules. We carry out this work in the field of building engineering construction. Having formal and executable versions of the business rules enables to perform automatic compliance checking of digital mock-ups of construction projects under design.For this we made available to business experts, the two main contributions of this thesis. The first is the development of a controlled natural language, called RAINS. It allows business experts to rewrite business rules in the form of formal rules. A RAINS rule consists of terms of the business vocabulary and reserved words such as comparison predicates, negation and universal quantification markers and literals. Each RAINS rule has a unique formal semantics which is based on the standards of the Semantic Web. The second major contribution is a service for formalization of business rules. This service implements a formalized approach proposed in this thesis and called FORSA. This service offers RAINS versions of natural language business rules submitted to it. FORSA uses natural language processing tools and heuristics. To evaluate FORSA, we have set up a benchmark adapted to the formalization of business rules task. The dataset from this benchmark are from norms in the field of Construction

The semantic web aims to make the meaning of data on the web explicit and machine processable. Harking back to Leibniz in its vision, it imagines a world of interlinked information that computers `understand' and `know' how to process based on its meaning. Spearheaded by the World Wide Web Consortium, ontology languages OWL and RDF form the core of the current technical offerings. RDF has successfully enabled the construction of virtually unlimited webs of data, whilst OWL gives the ability to express complex relationships between RDF data triples. However, the formal semantics of these languages limit themselves to that aspect of meaning that can be captured by mechanical inference rules, leaving many open questions as to other aspects of meaning and how they might be made machine processable. The Semantic Web has faced a number of problems that are addressed by the included publications. Its germination within academia, and logical semantics has seen it struggle to become familiar, accessible and implementable for the general IT population, so an overview of semantic technologies is provided. Faced with competing `semantic' languages, such as the ISO's Topic Map standards, a method for building ISO-compliant Topic Maps in the OWL DL language has been provided, enabling them to take advantage of the more mature OWL language and tools. Supplementation with rules is needed to deal with many real-world scenarios and this is explored as a practical exercise. The available syntaxes for OWL have hindered domain experts in ontology building, so a natural language syntax for OWL designed for use by non-logicians is offered and compared with similar offerings. In recent years, proliferation of ontologies has resulted in far more than are needed in any given domain space, so a mechanism is proposed to facilitate the reuse of existing ontologies by giving contextual information and leveraging social factors to encourage wider adoption of common ontologies and achieve interoperability. Lastly, the question of meaning is addressed in relation to the need to define one's terms and to ground one's symbols by anchoring them effectively, ultimately providing the foundation for evolving a `Pragmatic Web' of action.

The semantic web aims to make the meaning of data on the web explicit and machine processable. Harking back to Leibniz in its vision, it imagines a world of interlinked information that computers `understand' and `know' how to process based on its meaning. Spearheaded by the World Wide Web Consortium, ontology languages OWL and RDF form the core of the current technical offerings. RDF has successfully enabled the construction of virtually unlimited webs of data, whilst OWL gives the ability to express complex relationships between RDF data triples. However, the formal semantics of these languages limit themselves to that aspect of meaning that can be captured by mechanical inference rules, leaving many open questions as to other aspects of meaning and how they might be made machine processable. The Semantic Web has faced a number of problems that are addressed by the included publications. Its germination within academia, and logical semantics has seen it struggle to become familiar, accessible and implementable for the general IT population, so an overview of semantic technologies is provided. Faced with competing `semantic' languages, such as the ISO's Topic Map standards, a method for building ISO-compliant Topic Maps in the OWL DL language has been provided, enabling them to take advantage of the more mature OWL language and tools. Supplementation with rules is needed to deal with many real-world scenarios and this is explored as a practical exercise. The available syntaxes for OWL have hindered domain experts in ontology building, so a natural language syntax for OWL designed for use by non-logicians is offered and compared with similar offerings. In recent years, proliferation of ontologies has resulted in far more than are needed in any given domain space, so a mechanism is proposed to facilitate the reuse of existing ontologies by giving contextual information and leveraging social factors to encourage wider adoption of common ontologies and achieve interoperability. Lastly, the question of meaning is addressed in relation to the need to define one's terms and to ground one's symbols by anchoring them effectively, ultimately providing the foundation for evolving a `Pragmatic Web' of action.

Les langages contrôlés sont des langages artificiellement définis utilisant un sous-ensemble du vocabulaire, des formes morphologiques, des constructions syntaxiques d'une langue naturelle tout en en éliminant la polysémie. En quelque sorte, ils constituent le pont entre les langages formels et les langues naturelles. De ce fait, ils remplissent la fonction de communication du médium texte tout en étant rigoureux et analysables par la machine sans ambiguïté. En particulier, ils peuvent être utilisés pour faciliter l'alimentation de bases de connaissances, dans le cadre d'une interface homme-machine.Le Service Hydrographique et Océanographique de la Marine (SHOM) publie depuis 1971 les Instructions nautiques, des recueils de renseignements généraux, nautiques et réglementaires, destinés aux navigateurs. Ces ouvrages complètent les cartes marines. Elles sont obligatoires à bord des navires de commerce et de pêche. D'autre part, l'Organisation Hydrographique Internationale (OHI) a publié des normes spécifiant l'échange de données liées à la navigation et notamment un modèle universel de données hydrographiques (norme S-100, janvier 2010). Cette thèse se propose d'étudier l'utilisation d'un langage contrôlé pour représenter des connaissances contenues dans les Instructions nautiques, dans le but de servir de pivot entre la rédaction du texte par l'opérateur dédié, la production de l'ouvrage imprimé ou en ligne, et l'interaction avec des bases de connaissances et des outils d'aide à la navigation. En particulier on étudiera l'interaction entre le langage contrôlé des Instructions nautiques et les cartes électroniques correspondantes. Plus généralement, cette thèse se pose la question de l'évolution d'un langage contrôlé et des ontologies sous-jacentes dans le cadre d'une application comme les Instructions nautiques, qui ont la particularité d'avoir des aspects rigides (données numériques, cartes électroniques, législation) et des aspects nécessitant une certaine flexibilité (rédaction du texte par des opérateurs humains, imprévisibilité du type de connaissance à inclure par l'évolution des usages et des besoins des navigants). De manière similaire aux ontologies dynamiques que l'on rencontre dans certains domaines de connaissance, on définit ici un langage contrôlé dynamique. Le langage contrôlé décrit dans cette thèse constitue une contribution intéressante pour la communauté concernée puisqu'il touche au domaine maritime, domaine encore inexploité dans l'étude des langages contrôlés, mais aussi parce qu'il présente un aspect hybride, prenant en compte les multiples modes (textuel et visuel) présents dans le corpus constitué par les Instructions nautiques et les documents qu'elles accompagnent. Bien que créé pour le domaine de la navigation maritime, les mécanismes du langage contrôlé présentés dans cette thèse ont le potentiel pour être adaptés à d'autres domaines utilisant des corpus multimodaux. Enfin, les perspectives d'évolution pour un langage contrôlé hybride sont importantes puisqu'elles peuvent exploiter les différents avantages des modes en présence (par exemple, une exploitation de l'aspect visuel pour une extension 3D). / Controlled Natural Languages (CNL) are artificial languages that use a subset of the vocabulary, morphological forms and syntactical constructions of a natural language while eliminating its polysemy. In a way, they constitute the bridge between formal languages and natural languages. Therefore, they perform the communicative function of the textual mode while being precise and computable by the machine without any ambiguity. In particular, they can be used to facilitate the population or update of knowledge bases within the framework of a human-machine interface.Since 1971, the French Marine Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service (SHOM) issues the French Coast Pilot Books Instructions nautiques , collections of general, nautical and statutory information, intended for use by sailors. These publications aim to supplement charts, in the sense that they provide the mariner with supplemental information not in the chart. They are mandatory for fishing and commercial ships. On the other hand, the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) issued standards providing information about navigational data exchange. Among these standards, one of a particular interest is the universal model of hydrographic data (S-100 standard, January, 2010).This thesis analyses the use of a CNL to represent knowledge contained in the Instructions nautiques. This CNL purpose is to act as a pivot between the writing of the text by the dedicated operator, the production of the printed or online publication, and the interaction with knowledge bases and navigational aid tools. We will focus especially on the interaction between the Instructions nautiques Controlled Natural Language and the corresponding Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC).More generally, this thesis asks the question of the evolution of a CNL and the underlying ontologies involved in the Instructions nautiques project. Instructions nautiques have the particularity of combining both strictness (numerical data, electronic charts, legislation) and a certain amount of flexibility (text writing by human operators, unpredictability of the knowledge to be included due to the evolution of sailors¿ practices and needs). We define in this thesis a dynamic CNL in the same way that dynamic ontologies are defined in particular domains. The language described in this thesis is intended as an interesting contribution for the community involved in CNL. Indeed, it addresses the creation of a CNL for the unexploited domain of maritime navigation, but its hybrid aspects as well through the exploration of the multiple modalities (textual and visual) coexisting in a corpus comprising ENC and their companion texts. The mechanisms of the CNL presented in this thesis, although developed for the domain of the maritime navigation, have the potential to be adapted to other domains using multimodal corpuses. Finally, the benefits in the future of a controlled hybrid language are undeniable: the use of the different modalities in their full potential can be used in many different applications (for example, the exploitation of the visual modality for a 3D extension).

Submitted by Natalia de Souza Gonçalves (natalia.goncalves@ufpe.br) on 2016-09-28T12:33:15Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) GustavoHPCarvalho_Doutorado_CInUFPE_2016.pdf: 1763137 bytes, checksum: aed7b3ab2f6235757818003678633c9b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-28T12:33:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) GustavoHPCarvalho_Doutorado_CInUFPE_2016.pdf: 1763137 bytes, checksum: aed7b3ab2f6235757818003678633c9b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-26 / High trustworthiness levels are usually required when developing critical systems, and model based testing (MBT) techniques play an important role generating test cases from specification models. Concerning critical systems, these models are usually created using formal or semi-formal notations. Moreover, it is also desired to clearly and formally state the conditions necessary to guarantee that an implementation is correct with respect to its specification by means of a conformance relation, which can be used to prove that the test generation strategy is sound. Despite the benefits of MBT, those who are not familiar with the models syntax and semantics may be reluctant to adopt these formalisms. Furthermore, most of these models are not available in the very beginning of the project, when usually natural-language requirements are available. Therefore, the use of MBT is postponed. Here, we propose an MBT strategy for generating test cases from controlled naturallanguage (CNL) requirements: NAT2TEST, which refrains the user from knowing the syntax and semantics of the underlying notations, besides allowing early use of MBT via naturallanguage processing techniques; the formal and semi-formal models internally used by our strategy are automatically generated from the natural-language requirements. Our approach is tailored to data-flow reactive systems: a class of embedded systems whose inputs and outputs are always available as signals. These systems can also have timed-based behaviour, which may be discrete or continuous. The NAT2TEST strategy comprises a number of phases. Initially, the requirements are syntactically analysed according to a CNL we proposed to describe data-flow reactive systems. Then, the requirements informal semantics are characterised based on the case grammar theory. Afterwards, we derive a formal representation of the requirements considering a model of dataflow reactive systems we defined. Finally, this formal model is translated into communicating sequential processes (CSP) to provide means for generating test cases. We prove that our test generation strategy is sound with respect to our timed input-output conformance relation based on CSP: csptio. Besides CSP, we explore the generation of other target notations (SCR and IMR) from which we can generate test cases using commercial tools (T-VEC and RT-Tester, respectively). The whole process is fully automated by the NAT2TEST tool. Our strategy was evaluated considering examples from the literature, the aerospace (Embraer) and the automotive (Mercedes) industry. We analysed performance and the ability to detect defects generated via mutation. In general, our strategy outperformed the considered baseline: random testing. We also compared our strategy with relevant commercial tools. / Testes baseados em modelos (MBT) consiste em criar modelos para especificar o comportamento esperado de sistemas e, a partir destes, gerar testes que verificam se implementações possuem o nível de confiabilidade esperado. No contexto de sistemas críticos, estes modelos são normalmente (semi)formais e deseja-se uma definição precisa das condições necessárias para garantir que uma implementação é correta em relação ao modelo da especificação. Esta definição caracteriza uma relação de conformidade, que pode ser usada para provar que uma estratégia de MBT é consistente (sound). Apesar dos benefícios, aqueles sem familiaridade com a sintaxe e a semântica dos modelos empregados podem relutar em adotar estes formalismos. Aqui, propõe-se uma estratégia de MBT para gerar casos de teste a partir de linguagem natural controlada (CNL). Esta estratégia (NAT2TEST) dispensa a necessidade de conhecer a sintaxe e a semântica das notações formais utilizadas internamente, uma vez que os modelos intermediários são gerados automaticamente a partir de requisitos em linguagem natural. Esta estratégia é apropriada para sistemas reativos baseados em fluxos de dados: uma classe de sistemas embarcados cujas entradas e saídas estão sempre disponíveis como sinais. Estes sistemas também podem ter comportamento dependente do tempo (discreto ou contínuo). Na estratégia NAT2TEST, inicialmente, os requisitos são analisados sintaticamente de acordo com a CNL proposta neste trabalho para descrever sistemas reativos. Em seguida, a semântica informal dos requisitos é caracterizada utilizando a teoria de gramática de casos. Posteriormente, deriva-se uma representação formal dos requisitos considerando um modelo definido neste trabalho para sistemas reativos. Finalmente, este modelo é traduzido em uma especificação em communicating sequential processes (CSP) para permitir a geração de testes. Este trabalho prova que a estratégia de testes proposta é consistente considerando a relação de conformidade temporal baseada em entradas e saídas também definida aqui: csptio. Além de CSP, foi explorada a geração de outras notações formais (SCR e IMR), a partir das quais é possível gerar casos de teste usando ferramentas comerciais (T-VEC e RT-Tester, respectivamente). Todo o processo é automatizado pela ferramenta NAT2TEST. A estratégia NAT2TEST foi avaliada considerando exemplos da literatura, da indústria aeroespacial (Embraer) e da automotiva (Mercedes). Foram analisados o desempenho e a capacidade de detectar defeitos gerados através de operadores de mutação. Em geral, a estratégia NAT2TEST apresentou melhores resultados do que a referência adotada: testes aleatórios. A estratégia NAT2TEST também foi comparada com ferramentas comerciais relevantes.