Transcript

1. On Presuppositions in Requirements Lin Ma Bashar Nuseibeh , Paul Piwek, Anne De Roeck, Alistair
Willis Department of Computing The Open University, U.K. Acknowledgement : MaTREx Project
(EPSRC Grant Number: EP/F069227/1)

2. Research Aim and summary

To discover tacit knowledge in requirements text by tracking linguistic presuppositions.

Specific focus:

Nocuous tacit knowledge

Determined by human judgement

Wider context:

MaTREx project on use of NLP techniques, such as ambiguity analysis and presuppositions

3. Tacit Knowledge
We know more than we can tell Polanyi, 1963

Janik (1988) argues that the term tacit knowledge is used at two ways:

firstly, following Polanyi, tacit knowledge is knowledge inexpressible in words , and it is acquired
by familiarity or practice such as smells and sounds;

secondly, tacit knowledge at a shallow level is knowledge not yet put into words such as craft
knowledge and presuppositions .

We adopt Janeks second perspective:

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that knowers know and could have articulated but omit doing so
for some reason, perhaps because they simply were not asked .

4. Presupposition
Presuppositions are background information or assumptions that can be taken for granted.

Examples:

The King of France is Bald.

Presupposition: There is king of France.

John knows that Susan is coming to the party.

Presupposition : Susan is coming to the party.

Richard managed to pass the exam.

Presupposition : Richard tried to pass the exam.

5. Presupposition triggers
Presupposition is believed to be signalled by certain types of syntactical structure, which are called
presupposition triggers .

Triggers:

Definite description: The King of France

Factive verb: know

Implicative verb: manage

6. Presupposition triggers - cont.

The trigger types include:

Definite descriptions , e.g. the device, its accessibility;

Factive verbs , e.g. know, reveal;

Implicative verbs , e.g. avoid, intend;

Change of state verbs , e.g. continue, stop;

Clefts it + be + noun + subordinate clause;

Stressed constituents words in italic in texts;

Counter factual conditionals what would be the case is something were true;

Expressions of repetition , e.g. also, too;

Temporal relations , e.g. since, after;

Comparisons , e.g. less/larger than

7. Our preliminary case study

We studied a 20-page requirements document for integrated circuit chip design.

Our study was mostly manual , although we automated the identification of noun phrases.

We recorded the kinds of presuppositions that appeared, and found the majority triggered by definite
descriptions .

8. Examples found in document

Noun phrases

Sentence: Accessibility in the experimental hall is required for changing the piggy board where the
device will be mounted.

Presuppositions: There is a piggy board.

There is a device.

Factive verb

Sentence: tests revealed that redundancy to Single Event Upsets is required.

Presupposition: Redundancy to Single Event Upsets is required.

Implicative verb

Sentence: chambers shall avoid that two CMA share the same gas volume

Presupposition: Two CMA may share the same gas volume.

9. Which presuppositions are dangerous?

Accessibility in the experimental hall is required for changing the piggy board where the device
will be mounted.

A new device or the piggy board?

...will have various interfaces for different groups of users. While the appearance of the user
interface may be similar, the functionality of each user interface will be distinct...

The user interface refers to various interfaces or each user interface?

10. Nocuously Tacit Knowledge

danger is in the eye of the beholder (the reader).

One way to determine this is by conducting empirical studies to elicit human judgements ( ala
Chantree et al @ RE06).

As with nocuous ambiguity , nocuous presuppositions are those that signal tacit knowledge who
tacitness may have a negative impact on the reading interpretation of the requirements.

11. Tracking presuppositions

What we know:

By using natural language processing techniques, definite descriptions can easily be found.

Where we are:

Currently, there are only a few representative example words or constructions of presupposition
triggers. They can only be found by hand.

What we need to do:

Detect more presupposition triggers based on natural language processing techniques, and try to
relate these to significant tacit knowledge.

12. Related work

Automatically tracking presupposition by NLP

K. Wiemer-Hastings and P. Wiemer-Hastings, DP: a detector for presuppositions in survey

questions, Proceedings of the sixth conference on Applied natural language processing , 2000, pp.
9096.D.

Clausen and C.D. Manning, Presupposed Content and Entailments in Natural Language Inference,
ACL-IJCNLP 2009 , p. 70.

Nothing in RE?

13. Future Work (Lins PhD research agenda!)

Case study on behaviour and linguistic attributes of presuppositions in more requirements
documents with the help of NLP.

Discovery of nocuous presuppositions by collecting human judgments from stakeholders

Building a system to automatically highlight presuppositions that have negative impact on

communication in requirement documents.

14. Conclusion

Our preliminary work has shown that tacit knowledge can be extracted by tracking presuppositions in
requirements documents.

With the help of NLP techniques and the involvement of human judgements, tracking
presuppositions in requirements can make some elements of tacit knowledge explicit.

15. Thank you.

Email:

{L.Ma, B.Nuseibeh, P.Piwek, A.Deroeck, A.G.Willis}@open.ac.uk

MaTREx Project:

http://crc.open.ac.uk/matrex

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/research/projects/matrex/

http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewPanelROL.aspx?PanelId=4612&RankingListId=6037