Automated Conditional Statements Checking for Complete Natural Language Requirements Specification

Defects such as the duality and the incompleteness in natural language software requirements specification have a significant impact on the success of software projects. By now, many approaches have been proposed to assist requirements analysts to identify these defects. Different from these approaches, this paper focuses on the requirements incompleteness implied by the conditional statements, and proposes a sentence embedding- and antonym-based approach for detecting the requirements incompleteness. The basic idea is that when one condition is stated, its opposite condition should also be there. Otherwise, the requirements specification is incomplete. Based on the state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques, the proposed approach first extracts the conditional sentences from the requirements specification, and elicits the conditional statements which contain one or more conditional expressions. Then, the conditional statements are clustered using the sentence embedding technique. The conditional statements in each cluster are further analyzed to detect the potential incompleteness by using negative particles and antonyms. A benchmark dataset from an aerospace requirements specification has been used to validate the proposed approach. The experimental results have shown that the recall of the proposed approach reaches 68.75%, and the F1-measure (F1) 52.38%.

Personality coherence in acts and texts: Searching for coherence within and beyond trait categories

This paper reports two studies that explore complementary aspects of personality coherence. Study 1 addressed cross-situational coherence in contextualized psychological response. Idiographically-tailored methods assessed individuals’ (i) beliefs about their personal attributes, (ii) subjective “mappings” of these attributes to everyday circumstances, and (iii) self-reported contextualized action tendencies. A novel index of idiographic–nomothetic relations gauged the degree to which the idiographic methods yield unique information. Participants’ mappings commonly deviated from the structure of nomothetic trait categories; people often grouped together contextualized action tendencies traditionally associated with different trait categories. The idiographic mappings predicted cross-situational coherence in action tendencies. Study 2 asked whether the contextualization of personal qualities would be evident when people merely are asked to describe their personal attributes in natural language. Participants wrote narratives describing positive and negative qualities. Narratives were coded for the presence of three linguistic features: conditional statements, probabilistic statements, and personality trait inconsistencies. All three occurred frequently. Furthermore, they co-occurred; among participants who described trait-inconsistent attributes, the large majority spontaneously cited conditions in which these attributes are manifested. People who recognize that they possess inconsistent personal qualities may nonetheless attain a coherent understanding of themselves by spontaneously developing a contextually-embedded sense of self.

Powers in Contemporary Philosophy

Four metaphysicians, Charlie Martin, David Lewis, David Armstrong, and George Molnar, offer distinctive approaches to understanding powers. Martin challenges the widely held view that disposition statements can be eliminated in favor of conditional statements. The apparent failure of the conditional analysis clears the path for Martin’s idea that all properties have some degree of irreducible dispositionality. Lewis takes on Martin’s challenge and offers his reformed conditional analysis. This analysis does not purport to eliminate talk of dispositions, but instead metaphysically reduces dispositions to their causal bases. Armstrong also reduces dispositions, but he reduces them to categorical universals governed by natural laws. Molnar argues that each of the aforementioned views falters when confronted with the powers of fundamental particles, which are said to be ungrounded pure powers. Molnar holds that both fundamental and derivative powers exist alongside non-power spatial and temporal properties. Debates among these four philosophers in the latter half of the 20th century constitute a substantial part of the reemergence of discussion of powers in contemporary metaphysics.

Sensitivity of implicit evaluations to accurate and erroneous propositional inferences

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations are widely assumed to be sensitive to logical structure. However, whether implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are uniquely sensitive to co-occurrence information or can also reflect logical structure has been a matter of theoretical debate. To test these competing ideas, participants (N = 3,928) completed a learning phase consisting of a series of two-step trials. In step 1, one or more conditional statements (A → B) containing novel targets co-occurring with valenced adjectives (e.g., “if you see a blue square, Ibbonif is sincere”) were presented. In step 2, a disambiguating stimulus, e.g., blue square (A) or gray blob (¬A) was revealed. Co-occurrence information, disambiguating stimuli, or both were varied between conditions to enable investigating the unique and joint effects of each. Across studies, the combination of conditional statements and disambiguating stimuli licensed different normatively accurate inferences. In Study 1, participants were prompted to use modus ponens (inferring B from A → B and A). In Studies 2–4, the information did not license accurate inferences, but some participants made inferential errors: affirming the consequent (inferring A from A → B and B; Study 2) or denying the antecedent (inferring ¬B from A → B and ¬A; Studies 3A, 3B, and 4). Bayesian modeling using ordinal constraints on condition means yielded consistent evidence for the sensitivity of both explicit (self-report) and implicit (IAT and AMP) evaluations to the (correctly or erroneously) inferred truth value of propositions. Together, these data suggest that implicit evaluations, similar to their explicit counterparts, can reflect logical structure.

Sensitivity of implicit evaluations to accurate and erroneous propositional inferences

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations are widely assumed to be sensitive to logical structure. However, whether implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are uniquely sensitive to co-occurrence information or can also reflect logical structure has been a matter of theoretical debate. To test these competing ideas, participants (N = 3,928) completed a learning phase consisting of a series of two-step trials. In step 1, one or more conditional statements (A → B) containing novel targets co-occurring with valenced adjectives (e.g., “if you see a blue square, Ibbonif is sincere”) were presented. In step 2, a disambiguating stimulus, e.g., blue square (A) or gray blob (¬A) was revealed. Co-occurrence information, disambiguating stimuli, or both were varied between conditions to enable investigating the unique and joint effects of each. Across studies, the combination of conditional statements and disambiguating stimuli licensed different normatively accurate inferences. In Study 1, participants were prompted to use modus ponens (inferring B from A → B and A). In Studies 2–4, the information did not license accurate inferences, but some participants made inferential errors: affirming the consequent (inferring A from A → B and B; Study 2) or denying the antecedent (inferring ¬B from A → B and ¬A; Studies 3A, 3B, and 4). Bayesian modeling using ordinal constraints on condition means yielded consistent evidence for the sensitivity of both explicit (self-report) and implicit (IAT and AMP) evaluations to the (correctly or erroneously) inferred truth value of propositions. Together, these data suggest that implicit evaluations, similar to their explicit counterparts, can reflect logical structure.

Efficient Implementation of NIST LWC ESTATE Algorithm Using OpenCL and Web Assembly for Secure Communication in Edge Computing Environment

In edge computing service, edge devices collect data from a number of embedded devices, like sensors, CCTVs (Closed-circuit Television), and so on, and communicate with application servers. Since a large portion of communication in edge computing services are conducted in wireless, the transmitted data needs to be properly encrypted. Furthermore, the application servers (resp. edge devices) are responsible for encrypting or decrypting a large amount of data from edge devices (resp. terminal devices), the cryptographic operation needs to be optimized on both server side and edge device side. Actually, the confidentiality and integrity of data are essential for secure communication. In this paper, we present two versions of security software which can be used on edge device side and server side for secure communication between them in edge computing environment. Our softwares are basically web-based application because of its universality where the softwares can be executed on any web browsers. Our softwares make use of ESTATE (Energy efficient and Single-state Tweakable block cipher based MAC-Then-Encrypt)algorithm, which is a promising candidate of NIST LWC (National Institute of Standards and Technology LightWeight Cryptography) competition and it provides not only data confidentiality but also data authentication. It also implements the ESTATE algorithm using Web Assembly for efficient use on edge devices, and optimizes the performance of the algorithm using the properties of the underlying block cipher. Several methods are applied to efficiently operate the ESTATE algorithm. We use conditional statements to XOR the extended tweak values during the operation of the ESTATE algorithm. To eliminate this unnecessary process, we use a method of expanding and storing the tweak value through pre-computation. The measured results of the ESTATE algorithm implemented with Web Assembly and the reference C/C++ ESTATE algorithm are compared. ESTATE implemented as Web Assembly is measured in web browsers Chrome, FireFox, and Microsoft Edge. For efficiency on server side, we make use of OpenCL which is parallel computing framework in order to process a number of data simultaneously. In addition, when implementing with OpenCL, using conditional statements causes performance degradation. We eliminated the conditional statement using the loop unrolling method to eliminate the performance degradation. In addition, OpenCL operates by moving the data to be encrypted to the local memory because the local memory has a high operation speed. TweAES-128 and TweAES-128-6, which have the same structure as AES algorithm, can apply the previously existing studied T-table method. In addition, the input value 16-byte is processed in parallel and calculated. In addition, since it may be vulnerable to cache-timing attack, it is safely operated by applying the previously existing studied T-table shuffling method. Our softwares cover the necessary security service from edge devices to servers in edge computing services and they can be easily used for various types of edge computing devices because they are all web-based applications.

Grand Theory and Middle-Range Theory

This chapter differentiates between grand theory and middle-range theory. The study of social phenomena raises the twofold question about the internal and external validity of a hypothesis. A piece of research is internally valid when it describes the true state of affairs within its own setting. The extent to which its findings can be applied to other settings will determine its relative external validity. External validity is a product of the theoretical aspirations of the research. When grand in scope, theoretical aspirations reject the importance of specific variations and attempt to describe the true state of affairs in all settings. Conversely, a theory-building exercise with a mid-range scope is bound by a set of conditional statements. Whereas middle-range theory-building is rooted in generalizable empirical propositions, grand theory-building is based on internally consistent ontologies. On the one hand, grand theory favours highly abstract theorizing, which is fairly distinct from concrete empirical concerns. On the other hand, middle-range theories reflect more sociologically embedded theorizing, which strives to integrate theory and empirical variations over time and space.