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Requirements engineering's continuing dependence on natural language description has made it the focus of several efforts to apply language engineering techniques. The raw textual material that forms an input to early phase requirements engineering and which informs the subsequent formulation of the requirements is inevitably uncontrolled and this makes its processing very hard. Nevertheless, sufficiently robust techniques do exist that can be used to aid the requirements engineer provided that the scope of what can be achieved is understood. In this paper, we show how combinations of lexical and shallow semantic analysis techniques developed from corpus linguistics can help human analysts acquire the deep understanding needed as the first step towards the synthesis of requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how design time testing may be used in conjunction with formal specification. Emphasis is placed upon the benefits of using an executable specification language OBJ, a design controlled by requirements specification and adherence to the "regularity" and "uniformity" hypotheses in dynamic validation. Such an approach offers positive benefits by providing early design validation and a controlled, disciplined design process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces web structures and their transformations as a tool for representing and manipulating programs. The theory of web structures and web structure transformations is developed in the framework of the category theory. Once a program has been represented as a web structure, software tools, such as a high level data flow analyzer or other general program transformers, can be written as sets of web structure production rules. An implementation of web structure transformations, along the lines of [1], is in progress. On the other hand, the mathematical theory of web structure transformations allows formal proofs of properties both at the metatheoretical and theoretical levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distributed system is an interconnected network of computing elements or nodes, each of which has its own storage. A distributed program is a collection of processes which execute asynchronously, possibly in different nodes of a distributed system, and they communicate with each other in order to realize a common goal. In such an environment, a group of processes may sometimes get involved in a communication deadlock. This is a situation in which each member process of the group is waiting for some member to communicate with it, but no member is attempting communication with it. In this paper, we present an algorithm for detecting such communication deadlocks. The algorithm is distributed, i.e., processes detect deadlocks during the course of their communication, without the aid of a central controller. The detection scheme does not presume any a priori structure among processes, and detection is made "on the fly" without freezing normal activities. The scheme does not require any storage whose size is determined by the size of the network, and hence is suitable also for an environment where processes are created dynamically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]