1970300
Acting out the future: a process for envisionment
It is difficult to design innovative information and communication technologies to meet needs that will emerge from future interactions between users, technologies and their situations of use. We have been using scenarios that are acted out as a way of envisioning the future. This paper describes some of the core dilemmas of innovative design. It draws on our existing work as well as ideas from a range of disciplines to present a ‘light’ but useful envisionment process that may be applied to commercial design problems.
131770741
Structured Case: A Methodological Framework for Building Theory in Information Systems Research
This paper presents a methodological framework, structured-case, that assists IS researchers to undertake and assess theory building research within the interpretive paradigm, and explains its value in achieving convincing explanations that are strongly linked to both the research themes and data collected in the field.
5226548
Parsing with an Extended Domain of Locality
One of the claimed benefits of Tree Adjoining Grammars is that they have an extended domain of locality (EDOL). We consider how this can be exploited to limit the need for feature structure unification during parsing. We compare two wide-coverage lexicalized grammars of English, LEXSYS and XTAG, finding that the two grammars exploit EDOL in different ways.
14287805
A Formalism and Environment for the Development of a Large Grammar of English
Natural language grammars with large coverage are typically the result of many person-years of effort, working with clumsy formalisms and sub-optimal software support for grammar development. This paper describes our approach to the task of writing a substantial grammar, as part of a collaboration to produce a general purpose morphological and syntactic analyser for English. The grammatical formalism we have developed for the task is a metagrammatical notation which is a more expressive and computationally tractable variant of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. We have also implemented a software system which provides a highly integrated and very powerful set of tools for developing and managing a large grammar based on this notation. The system provides a grammarian with an environment which we have found to be essential for rapid but successful production of a substantial grammar.
2252135
Disambiguating Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives Using Automatically Acquired Selectional Preferences
Selectional preferences have been used by word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems as one source of disambiguating information. We evaluate WSD using selectional preferences acquired for English adjectivenoun, subject, and direct object grammatical relationships with respect to a standard test corpus. The selectional preferences are specific to verb or adjective classes, rather than individual word forms, so they can be used to disambiguate the co-occurring adjectives and verbs, rather than just the nominal argument heads. We also investigate use of the one-senseper-discourse heuristic to propagate a sense tag for a word to other occurrences of the same word within the current document in order to increase coverage. Although the preferences perform well in comparison with other unsupervised WSD systems on the same corpus, the results show that for many applications, further knowledge sources would be required to achieve an adequate level of accuracy and coverage. In addition to quantifying performance, we analyze the results to investigate the situations in which the selectional preferences achieve the best precision and in which the one-sense-per-discourse heuristic increases performance.
11544923
Unparsing RDF/XML
It is difficult to serialize an RDF graph as a humanly readable RDF/XML document. This paper describes the approach taken in Jena 1.2, in which a design pattern of guarded procedures invoked using top down recursive descent is used. Each procedure corresponds to a grammar rule; the guard makes the choice about the applicability of the production. This approach is seen to correspond closely to the design of an LL(k) parser, and a theoretical justification of this correspondence is found in universal algebra.
23810734
Requirements Development in Scenario-Based Design
We describe and analyze the process of requirements development in scenario based design through consideration of a case study. In our project, a group of teachers and system developers initially set out to create a virtual physics laboratory. Our design work centered on the collaborative development of a series of scenarios describing current and future classroom activities. We observed classroom scenarios to assess needs and opportunities, and envisioned future scenarios to specify and analyze possible design moves. We employed claims analysis to evaluate design trade-offs implicit in these scenarios, to codify the specific advantages and disadvantages in achieving requirements. Through the course of this process, the nature of our project requirements has evolved, providing more information but also more kinds of information. We discuss the utility of managing requirements development through an evolving set of scenarios, and the generality of the scenario stages from this case study.