Search

Cybercriminals have become an imperative threat because they target the most valuable resource on earth, data. Organizations prepare against cyber attacks by creating Cyber Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) that use various technologies to monitor and detect threats and to help perform forensics on machines and networks. Testing the limits of defense technologies and the skill of a CSIRT can be performed through adversary emulation performed by so-called "red teams". The red team's work is primarily manual and requires high skill. We propose SpecRep, a system to ease the testing of the detection capabilities of defenses in complex, heterogeneous infrastructures. SpecRep uses previously known attack specifications to construct attack scenarios based on attacker objectives instead of the traditional attack graphs or a list of actions. We create a metalanguage to describe objectives to be achieved in an attack together with a compiler that can build multiple attack scenarios that achieve the objectives. We use text processing tools aided by large language models to extract information from freely available white papers and convert them to plausible attack specifications that can then be emulated by SpecRep. We show how our system can emulate attacks against a smart home, a large enterprise, and an industrial control system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the challenges of understanding statistical language, particularly for students. The author shares their own struggles with mastering statistical language and highlights the issue of lexical ambiguity, where statistical terms have different meanings than their everyday counterparts. The lack of standardization in statistical language and the confusion caused by different terms for the same concepts are also discussed. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding statistical language for full participation in the discipline and suggests the need for careful language choice and awareness of lexical ambiguity. Different approaches to terminology and definitions are explored, with an emphasis on finding a balance between mathematical and linguistic requirements. The article acknowledges the difficulty of achieving a perfect solution to these challenges. [Extracted from the article]

Critical systems, in which failure and malfunction may result in severe human, environmental, and financial damages, are essential components in various sectors and particularly in energy domains. Although undesirable, integration error problems in the supervision of critical systems do occur, incurring significant expenses due to an operator's subjective analysis and hardware topology failures. In this work, a malleable model design approach is proposed to formulate and solve the integration error problem in critical systems' supervision in terms of reliability. A real hybrid power plant (HPP) case is considered for a case study with simulated data. A method framework with an informal approach (C4 diagram) and formal approach (hierarchical colored Petri nets) in a radial spectrum is applied to the HPP supervision design. In using formal methods, a formulation and solution to this problem through structured, scalable, and compact mathematical representations are possible. This malleable model is intended to guarantee the functional correctness and also reliability of the plant supervision system based on system software architecture. The outcomes suggest that the malleable model is appropriate for the energy domain and can be used for other types of critical systems, bringing all the benefits of this methodology to the context in which it will be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the formal and critical consequences of organizing an aesthetic corpus around the philosophical concept of the fragment via a reading of Aryan Kaganof's "Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers" (1994). This experimental video sets spoken accounts from the perspective of the likes of Ted Bundy and Charles Manson alongside grainy, ambiguous imagery. Instead of thematic meditations on violence, the monologues circle around quasi-nostalgic reflections on the past and the nature of identity. The film frustrates any language of formal analysis that would rely on accounting for what is present in the film, instead proposing a sympathy with poststructuralism's efforts at displacing the metaphysics of appearance. Violence is not what resides ready-made within the work, nor is it reducible to the realm of the visible or the audible, but is an unstable process bound up with the act of reading itself. The fragment as a formal problem holds out the abstract, general notion of a break in ways that compel a rethinking of violence as something impersonal, rhythmic, and grammatical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Entities and Indices, M. J. Cresswell argued that a first-order modal language can reach the expressive power of natural-language modal discourse only if we give to the formal language a semantics with indices containing infinite possible worlds and we add to it an infinite collection of operators actually n and R e f n which store and retrieve worlds. In the fourth chapter of the book, Cresswell gave a proof that the resulting intensional language, which he called L ∗ , is as expressive as an extensional variant of it, called L , which has full quantification over worlds. In both linguistics and philosophy, Cresswell's book has been viewed as offering a compelling argument for preferring extensional systems in the study of natural language. In this paper, after providing a model-theoretic definition of the relation being as expressive as that can be applied to Cresswell's languages L and L ∗ , we show that the intensional language L ∗ is not as expressive as the extensional language L . This result, we claim, undermines Cresswell's argument to the effect that English modal discourse has the power of explicit quantification over worlds. Additionally, we show that L ∗ does become as expressive as L when we add Cresswell's operator of universal modality □ to L ∗ , which provides an extra amount of expressive power. Recently, I. Yanovich has advocated a view that is similar to ours in important respects. At the end of the paper we offer a short discussion of his formalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Sweden, treatment for children with (developmental) language disorder ((D)LD) is traditionally carried out at a speech-language pathology (SLP) clinic, and based on formal language tests, which may not entirely represent the child’s everyday language and communication skills. SLP services that include video recordings have shown positive outcomes in terms of providing information about children’s linguistic and communicative abilities in everyday life, but little is known about the use of video in clinical practice. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate how Swedish SLPs link their clinical practices (assessment, treatment, and evaluation of treatment outcome) to the everyday language and communication abilities of children with (D)LD. A further aim is to explore SLPs’ utilisation of video recordings as a part of their clinical practices with the target group. A web-based questionnaire was distributed to SLPs in Sweden, who work with children with (D)LD. Results demonstrate that Swedish SLPs perceive that their intervention is in alignment with children’s everyday language and communication needs to a fairly high degree. However, an exception is assessment, which is considered to have a weaker alignment with children’s everyday communication abilities. The use of video recordings for clinical purposes is very limited. It is suggested here that incorporating video recordings from children’s everyday life would be an easy and time-efficient way to strengthen the ecological validity of SLP practices for children with (D)LD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the paper is to present a methodology that can be used to translate a model from one formalism to another allowing model reuse and cross‐verification. With the use of formal languages, the model specifications can be expressed in a rigorous and univocal way, and the model can be validated against the specifications or conceptual model. Expressing the same model in different formal languages opens the conceptual model validation to a varied number of specialists. Also, in the context of modeling a new system, where there is no data to perform validation against a real system, having pairs of models can be used to perform cross‐model verification to ensure that the model specifications or conceptual models are correctly implemented by comparing the results produced by both models. Specifically, a method is presented to translate a model conceptualized on specification and description language (SDL) to discrete event system specification (DEVS). The transformation mechanism between SDL and DEVS formalisms is described. The methodology is exemplified with a disease spread model for COVID‐19, and it is shown how the results obtained by the two models can be used for cross‐verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we put forward models that generate two-dimensional palindromic languages with array-rewriting rules. The rewriting rules are of either regular or context-free type with terminals being arrays. The derivation lengths are managed by the array concatenation conditions. These grammars give rise to an extensive variety of palindromic pictures. Different hierarchies that exist between the classes defined are demonstrated. The closure properties have also been evaluated. Applications of these models have been explored by generating a few patterns of kolams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer complaints play a crucial role for companies in understanding customer needs and spotting possible areas of improvement. In the digital era, online platforms have become popular venues for users to voice their concerns. According to Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) and recipient design, consumers may have different recipients in mind when writing a complaint and tailor their language accordingly. This study aims to examine language variations in consumer complaints on an independent platform and a corporate platform, exploring how consumers adjust their language based on the intended recipients of their complaints. Comments under complaint posts from Reddit's dedicated subreddit, r/Spotify, and from the Spotify Community were extracted and analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a text analysis tool. This comparative analysis identified and compared various linguistic categories within the consumer complaints from the perspectives of formality, emotion, and assertion. The results showed that complaints on the corporate platform (1) used more formal language, (2) contained more negative emotional tones and emotion words, and (3) exhibited more assertiveness compared to those on the independent platform. Understanding the distinct linguistic features in consumer complaints on different platforms can help companies tailor their responses and address customer concerns effectively. This research contributes to the growing field of online consumer complaining behavior by uncovering how language is employed within different online communities depending on the message recipient. Furthermore, it demonstrates the potential of LIWC as a valuable tool for analyzing unstructured consumer‐generated content across diverse digital platforms, offering insights into user sentiment and experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammar error correction systems are pivotal in the field of natural language processing (NLP), with a primary focus on identifying and correcting the grammatical integrity of written text. This is crucial for both language learning and formal communication. Recently, neural machine translation (NMT) has emerged as a promising approach in high demand. However, this approach faces significant challenges, particularly the scarcity of training data and the complexity of grammar error correction (GEC), especially for low-resource languages such as Indonesian. To address these challenges, we propose InSpelPoS, a confusion method that combines two synthetic data generation methods: the Inverted Spellchecker and Patterns+POS. Furthermore, we introduce an adapted seq2seq framework equipped with a dynamic decoding method and state-of-the-art Transformer-based neural language models to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of GEC. The dynamic decoding method is capable of navigating the complexities of GEC and correcting a wide range of errors, including contextual and grammatical errors. The proposed model leverages the contextual information of words and sentences to generate a corrected output. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we conducted experiments using synthetic data and compared its performance with existing GEC systems. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in the accuracy of Indonesian GEC compared to existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with an important aspect of the integration of loan nouns into the grammatical systems of languages attesting to grammatical gender, namely gender assignment. Traditionally, it is assumed that gender assignment takes place according to the internal assignment rules of the replica language. In many cases, however, the original grammatical gender is borrowed along with the source word. This is the case of gender copy which often takes place under special (sociolinguistic) conditions and is used as assignment strategy in languages to a different extent. A special focus of my study is on gender assignment and particularly gender copy in the contact of languages of different assignment types (formal vs. semantic). The empirical data comes from five European languages in different sociolinguistic situations, attesting to different assignment systems and of different language branches of two language families – Indo-European (Romanian, Slavic, and Indo-Arian) and Nakh-Daghestanian (Lezgic and Tsezic). The analysis shows that gender copy is possible mostly in the contact of languages of the same assignment type. In the contact of languages of the formal assignment type, gender copy often goes along with the formal adjustment of the loan word. Sociolinguistic circumstances play an important role as to the possibility and frequency of the occurrence of gender copy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we put forward models that generate two-dimensional palindromic languages with array-rewriting rules. The rewriting rules are of either regular or context-free type with terminals being arrays. The derivation lengths are managed by the array concatenation conditions. These grammars give rise to an extensive variety of palindromic pictures. Different hierarchies that exist between the classes defined are demonstrated. The closure properties have also been evaluated. Applications of these models have been explored by generating a few patterns of kolams.

We introduce the infix inclusion problem of two languages S and T that decides whether or not S is a subset of the set of all infixes of T. This problem is motivated by the need for identifying malicious computation patterns according to their semantics, which are often disguised with additional sub-patterns surrounding information. In other words, malicious patterns are embedded as an infix of the whole pattern. We examine the infix inclusion problem for the case where a source S and a target T are finite, regular or context-free languages. We prove that the problem is 1) co-NP-complete when one of the languages is finite, 2) PSPACE-complete when both S and T are regular, 3) EXPTIME-complete when S is context-free and T is regular, 4) undecidable when S is either regular or context-free and T is context-free and 5) undecidable when one of S and T is in a language class where the emptiness of its languages is undecidable, even if the other is finite. We, furthermore, explore the infix inclusion problem for visibly pushdown languages, a subclass of context-free languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word equations are equations α ≐ β where α and β are words consisting of letters from some alphabet Σ and variables from a set X. Recently, there has been substantial interest in the context of string solving in logics combining word equations with other kinds of constraints on words such as (regular) language membership (regular constraints) and arithmetic over string lengths (length constraints). We consider the expressive power of such logics by looking at the set of all values a single variable might take as part of a satisfying assignment for a given formula. Hence, each formula-variable pair defines a formal language, and each logic defines a class of formal languages. We consider logics arising from combining word equations with either length constraints, regular constraints, or both. We also consider word equations with visibly pushdown language membership constraints as a generalisation of the combination of regular and length constraints. We show that word equations with visibly pushdown membership constraints are sufficient to express all recursively enumerable languages and hence satisfiability is undecidable in this case. We then establish a strict hierarchy involving the other combinations. We also provide a complete characterisation of when a thin regular language is expressible by word equations (alone) and some further partial results for regular languages in the general case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the development and validation of a formal model for an automotive adaptive exterior lights system (ELS) with multiple variants in Alloy 6, which is the most recent version of the Alloy lightweight formal specification language that supports mutable relations and temporal logic. We explore different strategies to address variability, one in pure Alloy and another through an annotative language extension. We then show how Alloy and its Analyzer can be used to validate systems of this nature, namely by checking that the reference scenarios are admissible, and to automatically verify whether the established requirements hold. A prototype was developed to translate the provided validation sequences into Alloy and back to further automate the validation process. The resulting ELS model was validated against the provided validation sequences and verified for most of requirements for all variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present an approach to the ABZ 2020 case study that differs from those usually presented at ABZ: Rather than using a (correct-by-construction) approach following a formal method, we use C for a low-level implementation instead. We strictly adhere to test-driven development for validation, and only afterwards apply model checking using CBMC for verification. While the approach has several benefits compared to the more rigorous approaches, it also provides less mathematical clarity and overall less thorough verification. In consequence, our realization of the ABZ case study serves as a baseline reference for comparison, allowing to assess the benefit provided by the various formal modeling languages, methods and tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lewis (The Journal of Philosophy, 65(5), 113–126, 1968) attempts to provide an account of modal talk in terms of the resources of counterpart theory, a first-order theory that eschews transworld identity. First, a regimentation of natural language modal claims into sentences of a formal first-order modal language L is assumed. Second, a translation scheme from L-sentences to sentences of the language of the theory is provided. According to Hazen (The Journal of Philosophy, 76(6), 319–338, 1979) and Fara & Williamson (Mind, 114(453), 1–30, 2005), the account cannot handle certain natural language modal claims involving a notion of actuality. The challenge has two parts. First, in order to handle such claims, the initial formal modal language that natural language modal claims are regimented into must extend L with something like an actuality operator. Second, certain ways that Lewis' translation scheme for L might be extended to accommodate an actuality operator are unacceptable. Meyer (Mind, 122(485), 27–42, 2013) attempts to defend Lewis' approach. First, Meyer holds that in order to handle such claims, the formal modal language L ∗ that we initially regiment our natural language claims into need not contain an actuality operator. Instead, we can make do with other resources. Next, Meyer provides an alternative translation scheme from L ∗ -sentences to sentences of an enriched language of counterpart theory. Unfortunately, Meyer's approach fails to provide an appropriate counterpart theoretic account of natural language modal claims. In this paper, I demonstrate that failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reaction systems are a model of computing aiming to formalize biochemistry by capturing the qualitative relations between the species, and explicitly discarding any accounts of multiplicity. From the point of view of the formal language theory, this situates them in the realm of set rewriting. In this work, we propose a series of extensions of reaction systems to use strings. These extensions form a spectrum in the sense that all of them honor the hallmark features of the original model: the threshold principle and the non-permanency principle. We thoroughly discuss the details of the structure and the behavior of these variants, and commence studying their expressive power by comparing them to some classic models of computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work introduces the new class of pure reaction automata, as well as a new update manner, called maximal reactive manner, that can also be applied to standard reaction automata. Pure reaction automata differ from the standard model in that they don't have permanence: the entities that are not consumed by the reactions happening at a certain state are not conserved in the result states. We prove that the set of languages accepted by the new class under the maximal reactive manner contains the set of languages accepted by standard reaction automata under the same manner or under the maximal parallel manner. We also prove that a strict subclass of pure reaction automata can compute any partial recursive function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SEL, a State-based Language for Video Surveillance Modeling, is a formal language designed to represent and identify activities in surveillance systems through scenario semantics and the creation of motion primitives structured in programs. Motion primitives represent the temporal evolution of motion evidence. They are the most basic motion structures detected as motion evidence, including operators such as sequence, parallel, and concurrency, which indicate trajectory evolution, simultaneity, and synchronization. SEL is a very expressive language that characterizes interactions by describing the relationships between motion primitives. These interactions determine the scenario's activity and meaning. An experimental model is constructed to demonstrate the value of SEL, incorporating challenging activities in surveillance systems. This approach assesses the language's suitability for describing complicated tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex frameworks for defining programming languages aim to generate various tools (e.g. interpreters, symbolic execution engines, deductive verifiers, etc.) using only the formal definition of a language. When used at an industrial scale, these tools are constantly updated, and at the same time, it is required to be trustworthy. Ensuring the correctness of such a framework is practically impossible. A solution is to generate proof objects as correctness artefacts that can be checked by an external trusted checker. A logic suitable for developing such frameworks is matching logic. K framework is a canonical example having matching logic-based foundation. Since the (symbolic) configurations of the programs are represented by matching logic patterns, the algorithms computing the dynamics of these configurations can be seen as pattern transformers and a proof object should be generated for the relationship between these patterns. In this paper, we show that conjunctions and disjunctions of patterns, produced by semantics or analysis rules, can be safely normalized using unification and antiunification algorithms. We also provide a prototype implementation of our proof object generation technique and a checker for certifying the generated objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Team formation in an environment where some relevant parameters are not known in advance is a challenging problem. Communicating automata and distributed algorithms have been used to describe protocols for team formation. A high‐level specification provides a mathematical description of a protocol or a program. TLA +$$ {}^{+} $$ is a formal specification language designed to provide high‐level specifications of concurrent and distributed systems. The associated model checker known as TLC is capable of model checking the TLA +$$ {}^{+} $$ specifications. Recently, formal specification of a team formation protocol is given using TLA +$$ {}^{+} $$ when there is a single initiator (an agent or a robot) that initiates the team formation. Using TLA +$$ {}^{+} $$, we examine the formal specification for the multiple initiator situation and demonstrate that a composition technique can yield a single monolithic specification for the multiple initiator situation from the single initiator situation specification. We have used models of varying sizes, and the TLC model checker has confirmed that the protocol's specifications meet certain desired characteristics in each case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear temporal logic ( LTL ) and its variant interpreted on finite traces ( LTL f ) are among the most popular specification languages in the fields of formal verification, artificial intelligence, and others. In this paper, we focus on the satisfiability problem for LTL and LTL f formulas, for which many techniques have been devised during the last decades. Among these are tableau systems, of which the most recent is Reynolds' tree-shaped tableau. We provide a SAT-based algorithm for LTL and LTL f satisfiability checking based on Reynolds' tableau, proving its correctness and discussing experimental results obtained through its implementation in the BLACK satisfiability checker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An event schema provides a formal language for representing events and modeling knowledge about the world. Existing event schema induction methods often only applies text features to the cluster, restricting its cluster capabilities. This article presents a Graph-Based Event Schema Induction model to extract structural features from our constructed graph. Inspired by in-context learning, we propose a way to conceptualize clusters to generate event schemas. We evaluated the clustering experiment using the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI), normalized mutual information (NMI), accuracy (ACC), and BCubed-F1 metrics and generated event schemas based on overlap ratio and acceptable ratio. The experimental results show that our method has shown improvement in terms of clustering effectiveness, and the generated event schemas achieved highly acceptable ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signal temporal logic (STL) formulas have been widely used as a formal language to express complex robotic specifications, thanks to their rich expressiveness and explicit time semantics. Existing approaches for STL control synthesis suffer from limited scalability with respect to the task complexity and lack of robustness against the uncertainty, for example, external disturbances. In this paper, we study the online control synthesis problem for uncertain discrete-time systems subject to STL specifications. Different from existing techniques, we propose an approach based on STL, reachability analysis, and temporal logic trees. First, based on a real-time version of STL semantics, we develop the notion of tube-based temporal logic tree (tTLT) and its recursive (offline) construction algorithm. We show that the tTLT is an under-approximation of the STL formula, in the sense that a trajectory satisfying a tTLT also satisfies the corresponding STL formula. Then, an online control synthesis algorithm is designed using the constructed tTLT. It is shown that when the STL formula is robustly satisfiable and the initial state of the system belongs to the initial root node of the tTLT, it is guaranteed that the trajectory generated by the control synthesis algorithm satisfies the STL formula. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by several simulation examples and further demonstrate its practical usability on a hardware experiment. These results show that our approach is able to handle complex STL formulas with long horizons and ensure the robustness against the disturbances, which is beyond the scope of the state-of-the-art STL control synthesis approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to bridge the gap between deep learning and grammatical inference. Indeed, it provides an algorithm to extract a (stochastic) formal language from any recurrent neural network trained for language modelling. In detail, the algorithm uses the already trained network as an oracle—and thus does not require the access to the inner representation of the black-box—and applies a spectral approach to infer a weighted automaton. As weighted automata compute linear functions, they are computationally more efficient than neural networks and thus the nature of the approach is the one of knowledge distillation. We detail experiments on 62 data sets (both synthetic and from real-world applications) that allow an in-depth study of the abilities of the proposed algorithm. The results show the WA we extract are good approximations of the RNN, validating the approach. Moreover, we show how the process provides interesting insights toward the behavior of RNN learned on data, enlarging the scope of this work to the one of explainability of deep learning models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geometric problem solving (GPS) has always been a long-standing challenge in the fields of automated reasoning. Its problem representation and solution process embody rich symmetry. This paper is the second in a series of our works. Based on the Geometry Formalization Theory and the FormalGeo geometric formal system, we have developed the Formal Geometric Problem Solver (FGPS) in Python 3.10, which can serve as an interactive assistant or as an automated problem solver. FGPS is capable of executing geometric predicate logic and performing relational reasoning and algebraic computation, ultimately achieving readable, traceable, and verifiable automated solutions for geometric problems. We observed that symmetry phenomena exist at various levels within FGPS and utilized these symmetries to further refine the system's design. FGPS employs symbols to represent geometric shapes and transforms various geometric patterns into a set of symbolic operation rules. This maintains symmetry in basic transformations, shape constructions, and the application of theorems. Moreover, we also have annotated the formalgeo7k dataset, which contains 6981 geometry problems with detailed formal language descriptions and solutions. Experiments on formalgeo7k validate the correctness and utility of the FGPS. The forward search method with random strategy achieved a 39.71% problem-solving success rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We generalize the theory of linked partition ideals due to Andrews using finite automata in formal language theory and apply it to prove three Rogers-Ramanujan type identities for modulus 14 that were posed by Nandi through a vertex operator theoretic construction of the level 4 standard modules of the affine Lie algebra A(2) 2 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UNESCO (2013: 16) describes "intercultural competences" as: (1) the necessary linguistic knowledge and awareness when interacting with people from different cultures; (2) relevant knowledge about specific cultures; (3) broad comprehension about the issues that arise when members of different cultures interact; (4) adaptable attitudes that encourage creating and sustaining contact with diverse members of society. The development of intercultural competence has increasingly been recognized as a vital aim of foreign language (L2) education. The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between courses related to the culture of English-speaking countries and the development of intercultural communicative competence of English philology students. Specifically, it explores participants' opinions on whether the culture courses support students' ability to acquire academic-level communicative competence, fluency in formal and informal language, and a holistic understanding of the spectrum of Anglophone communities. The participants of the study were English philology students and lecturers teaching culture courses. A mixed methodology was used with two types of research methods: a student survey and semi-structured interviews with lecturers. The results of the study allow for a formulation of didactic implications for the development of intercultural competence of English philology students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the formal semantics of programming languages, with a specific focus on Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). It introduces the Robot DSL, characterized by total semantic functions, an infinite network size, and an obstacle-free environment. The study explores denotational and natural semantics, aiming to define and prove their equivalence. This work contributes to the understanding of programming languages with unique features, laying the groundwork for future developments in language design and formal semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling and verification of the correct behavior of embedded real-time systems with strict timing constraints is a well-known and important problem. Failing to fulfill a deadline in system operation can have severe consequences in the practical case. This paper proposes an approach to formal modeling and schedulability analysis. A novel extension of Petri Nets named Constraint Time Petri Nets (C-TPN) is developed, which enables the modeling of a collection of interdependent real-time tasks whose execution is constrained by the use of priority and shared resources like processors and memory data. A C-TPN model is reduced to a network of Timed Automata in the context of the popular Uppaal toolbox. Both functional and, most importantly, temporal properties can be assessed by exhaustive model checking and/or statistical model checking based on simulations. This paper first describes and motivates the proposed C-TPN modeling language and its formal semantics. Then, a Uppaal translation is shown. Finally, three models of embedded real-time systems are considered, and their properties are thoroughly verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessments constitute a fundamental and inevitable component of any educational journey. Manual effort required for the evaluation of these assessments is very high. Automation of the evaluation process and grading helps in making the review process more efficient, objective, and scalable, thereby reducing the workload of human reviewers. Automating the grading process for multiple-choice and short-answer assessments is relatively straightforward, but it poses significant challenges when applied to the evaluation of formal languages, particularly in the context of mathematical assessments. In this paper a model that automatically evaluates and grades the Quadratic Equation problems is presented. The study is conducted using a manually curated dataset comprising 1200 solutions to various quadratic equation problems. Embeddings of the quadratic solutions are generated using Google's T5 Model. These embeddings are then used to train different traditional and ensembled machine learning models along with complex Deep learning models like LSTM and Bi LSTM. An in-depth analysis of the fine-tuned T5 model's performance, evaluating its effectiveness in comparison with the pretrained T5 model in automatic grading of quadratic equation problems has been explored. Fine-tuning significantly contributes to the reduction of error by 70% and a noticeable increase in the R2 value to 97%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Requirements Engineering (RE) activity is often initiated with vaguely specified software requirements. The ambiguities must be overcome to the extent possible when the requirements are specified. Both functional (FRs) and non-functional (NFRs) requirements should be correctly and unambiguously specified. Users communicate about the NFRs in informal discussions. Requirements engineers use formal or semi-formal language notations to manually convey the NFRs. A laborious and ineffective manual approach, however, is unable to identify all likely NFRs and resolve ambiguities in those NFRs. This paper discusses an approach that attempts to overcome ambiguities from natural language requirements, recognize NFRs, and generate NFR specification through the extended Unified Modelling Language (UML) viz. use-case diagram. The empirical evaluation of the proposed approach on the PROMISE dataset achieves an average result of 79.76% recall, 90.05% precision, and 84.59% F-measure. The proposed approach allows the requirements analyst to semi-automatically recognize NFRs and visualize them using an extended use-case diagram at an early stage of RE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the modern world, structured and semi-structured knowledge bases hold a considerable amount of data. There-fore, people who are familiar with formal query languages should not be the only ones who can efficiently and clearly query them. Semantic Parsing (SP) is converting natural language utterances into formal meaning representations. The paper suggests a model for SP that uses a novel method of utilizing the Semi-Supervised Generative Adversarial Network (SS-GAN) to enhance the classifier performance. The proposed SS-GAN extends the fine-tuning of word embedding architectures using unlabeled examples in a generative adversarial environment. We provide a regularization strategy for addressing the mode missing problem and unstable training in SS-GAN. The main viewpoint is to use the extracted feature vectors from the discriminator. Hence, the generator produces outputs by aiding the discriminator's learned features. A reconstruction loss is added to the loss function of the SS-GAN to drive the genera-tor to reconstruct outputs from the discriminator's features, hence steering the generator toward actual data configurations. The proposed reconstruction loss improves the performance of SS-GAN, produces high-quality outputs, and may be combined with other regularization loss functions to improve the performance of diverse GANs. We employ BERT word embedding for our model, which can be included in a downstream task and fine-tuned as a model, while the pre-trained BERT model can capture various linguistic properties. We examine the suggested model using the WikiSQL and SparC datasets, and the analysis findings reveal our model outperforms its rivals. The findings from our experiments indicate that the need for labeled samples can be minimized, down to as few as 100 instances, while still achieving commendable classification outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many tasks in statistical and causal inference can be construed as problems of entailment in a suitable formal language. We ask whether those problems are more difficult, from a computational perspective, for causal probabilistic languages than for pure probabilistic (or "associational") languages. Despite several senses in which causal reasoning is indeed more complex—both expressively and inferentially—we show that causal entailment (or satisfiability) problems can be systematically and robustly reduced to purely probabilistic problems. Thus there is no jump in computational complexity. Along the way we answer several open problems concerning the complexity of well-known probability logics, in particular demonstrating the ${\exists \mathbb {R}}$ -completeness of a polynomial probability calculus, as well as a seemingly much simpler system, the logic of comparative conditional probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal pattern languages are used in industry to communicate and analyse requirements, as they are said to be both machine-readable and intuitively understandable for humans. The questions arise to what extent this intuitive understanding of a pattern language is in agreement with its formal semantics and whether this understanding can be increased systematically. We present two consecutive empirical experiments to address these questions. The formal semantics serves as an objective judge on the intuitive understanding. Our experiments confirm the practical usefulness of HanforPL insofar the intuition matches the formal semantics in most practically relevant cases. They also reveal a number of edge cases where even a prior exposure to formal logic is not a guarantee for correct understanding. We present and validate systematic adjustments to the patterns, leading to several large increases in understandability but come at the cost of new, but less impactful ambiguities. We demonstrate how an inquiry on the alignment of the intuitive and formal semantics of a pattern language can help to understand and improve the language. While results regarding the understandability of HanforPL are favourable in commonly used cases, there is potential for improvement. The systematic adaption of patterns shows that small modifications may have large effects on the alignment of formal and intuitive semantics, and that modification must be considered with caution in the context of the respective pattern to avoid unintentionally adding new ambiguities. This article is an extension of our published REFSQ paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at a further understanding on the role of formal language education in immigrants' inclusion and identity redefinition in a new society. We analyze adult immigrants' perspectives on education in Icelandic as a second language (ISL) by conducting a cross-analysis of a survey and various ethnographic studies. Many immigrants in Iceland report dissatisfaction with language courses and prefer to have courses better tailored to their practical daily needs. Teachers are evaluated positively, but curricular utility, concerns about in-class evaluations, unevenly prepared student cohorts, lack of opportunity to use class knowledge in further education, and a lack of availability of courses in rural areas are mentioned as challenges. This indicates that ISL education does not fulfil its "dual purpose" declared in the 2007 Icelandic immigration policy: strengthening the position of Icelandic and speeding up immigrants' integration. We make suggestions for further development of ISL education based on learners' perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fundamental relations in private law are claims and duties. These legal relations can be changed by agents with the appropriate legal powers. We use propositional dynamic logic and ideas about propositional control from the agency literature to formalize these changes in legal relations. Our models are sets of states with functions specifying atomic facts, agents' abilities to change atomic facts, legal relations between agents concerning changing atomic facts and agents' powers. We present a formal language that allows us to describe models and changes of models caused by two kinds of actions: actions that change atomic facts and actions that change legal relations. Next, we present a sound and complete calculus for this language. The paper demonstrates that the perspective on actions borrowed from computer science can be used to shed interesting light on the dynamics of legal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an interview with mathematician Martin Raussen, who discusses his involvement with the Nordic Congress of Mathematicians and his experiences interviewing Abel Prize recipients. Raussen reflects on his early interest in mathematics and his education, highlighting the challenges and excitement of studying the subject. He delves into his research on the interplay between directed homotopy in algebraic topology and concurrency in theoretical computer science, explaining the concept of concurrency and its relevance in distributed computing. Raussen also discusses his involvement in public outreach and conducting interviews with Abel Prize laureates. The article emphasizes the importance of promoting mathematics and the challenges in communicating its beauty and significance to the general public. It also mentions the increasing influence of mathematics in technology and society, as well as the role of computers and artificial intelligence in advancing mathematical research. The interview concludes with a discussion on the different approaches to mathematics and the importance of both theory building and problem solving. Raussen also shares his interests outside of mathematics, including reading popular science books, listening to music, and spending time with family. [Extracted from the article]

Rough set theory (RST) is a formal theory derived from logical properties of information systems. Rough set theory extends traditional set theory by defining a subset of a universe through the use of a pair of sets referred to as the lower and upper approximations. It is a mathematical approach for dealing with ambiguities and imprecisions in a variety of situation. Since its introduction by Zdislaw Pawlak in the late eighties of the previous century, it has evolved into pure and applied directions from mathematical, logical, and computational perspectives. The area of rough set theory in computational mathematics is rapidly developing. As far as vagueness and imprecision are concerned, rough set theory is basically a mathematical approach. An equivalence relation is a key concept in rough set models. Approximations at the lower and upper levels are constructed based on equivalence classes. There is wide application of algebraic systems in sequential machines, formal languages, arithmetic codes, and error-correction algorithms. The study of any set will be effective if an algebraic structure is developed for it. In the context of semigroups research, rough set theory can be used to analyse and understand the properties and relationships within semigroups. Semigroups and related algebraic structures and their properties can be explored more deeply when rough set theory is applied. The aim of this paper is to extend the concept of rough semigroup ideals. It has already been shown that some properties of rough (left, right) ideals in semigroups can be obtained by extending the notion of a left (right) ideal in a semigroup. As a result of considering h-ideals in semigroups, rough upper hideals (left & right) have been introduced here along with their properties. Also, the results related to rough semi-lattices and rough quotient semigroups are given. These concepts are explained with suitable examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring RPA (robotic process automation) security is a critical aspect when developing and operating automated software robots. One of the key steps for developing secure software robots is the design stage: the identification and specification of the requirements for the security of the system, the description of system precedents, the interaction between the classes involved in the robot being created, etc. Designs using security-oriented formal modeling languages, such as the UMLsec extension of UML, involve not only a visual representation of diagrams but also the possibility to focus the attention on security issues. However, currently, in the scientific community, there is no possibility of using stereotypes specialized for robots—a mechanism for expanding the unified modeling language that would explicitly reflect a specific problem in the subject area. In this article, we propose that the UMLRPAsec-extension for RPA can be used to model security in the RPA context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specification languages for runtime verification are commonly rooted in formal languages, such as temporal logic, automata, or regular expressions. We argue that, for practical purposes, specification languages for monitoring should allow language features similar to those found in general purpose programming languages, in addition to providing specialized monitoring constructs. Using a realistic and large event-log, we compare two such programming-oriented monitoring language systems to a temporal logic-based monitoring system that was previously evaluated on the same log. The first programming-oriented language is a library in Scala developed for runtime verification. The other language is a scripting language, originally developed for fast static code analysis. We formulate the same reasonably complex properties as in the temporal logic case, using both methods, and compare the efficiency with which they can be checked against the large event log, and the ease with which the properties can be formulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]