Representing clinical guidelines is a very complex knowledge-representation task, requiring a lot of expertise and efforts. Nevertheless, guideline representations often contain several kinds of errors. Therefore, checking the well-formedness and correctness of a guideline representation is an important task, which can be drastically improved with the adoption of computer programs. In this pape...

This paper deals with two linguistic phenomena which are usually considered cases of ill-formedness by the computational linguistics community: intersentential ellipsis and coordination (possibly with gaps). We present an original solution, if compared to those already known for the two phenomena. This solution is conceived within a relevant approach to parsing, i.e. chart parsing, and is coher...

This paper describes two experiments conducted to identify the role of synchronization in the perception of ‘speech and gesture’ communication and to isolate the parameters that determine the perception of temporal alignment. The results of the first experiment show that the synchronization between audio and visual signals determines the felicitousness of a multimodal utterance. With the second...

Java `ight is a large sequential sublanguage of Java. We formalize its abstract syntax, type system, well-formedness conditions, and an operational evaluation semantics. Based on this formalization, we can express and prove type soundness. All de nitions and proofs have been done formally in the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL. Thus this paper demonstrates that machine-checking the design of non-tr...

We propose a formal system for representing the available readings of sentences displaying quan-tifier scope ambiguity, in which partial scopes may be expressed. We show that using a theory of scope availability based upon the function-argument structure of a sentence allows a deter-ministic, polynomial time test for the availability of a reading, while solving the same problem within theories ...

Current Business-to-Business interactions rely on complex exchange of messages. Web Services technologies provide a basis to establish the Web as the ubiquitous technical platform for B2B applications. However, there is a need of formalism for specifying behaviour and verifying certain properties such as well-formedness or deadlock freedom. In this paper, we present a message-exchange pattern b...

We verify three decision procedures on context-free grammars utilized in a program analyzer for a server-side programming language. One of the procedures decides inclusion between a context-free language and a regular language. The other two decide decision problems related to the well-formedness and validity of XML documents. From its formalization, we generate executable code for a balancedne...

We propose a formal model of Bitcoin transactions, which is sufficiently abstract to enable formal reasoning, and at the same time is concrete enough to serve as an alternative documentation to Bitcoin. We use our model to formally prove some well-formedness properties of the Bitcoin blockchain, for instance that each transaction can only be spent once. We release an open-source tool through wh...

This paper describes the application of xlinkit, a generic tool for managing the consistency of distributed documents, to consistency checking in the context of UML modelling and software development. In particular, we report how we have developed an application of xlinkit to the UML Core package Well-Formedness Rules [9]. We first give an overview of how xlinkit works. We then expand on the sp...

We compare several languages for specifying Markovian population models such as queuing networks and chemical reaction networks. All these languages —matrix descriptions, stochastic Petri nets, stoichiometric equations, stochastic process algebras, and guarded command models— describe continuous-time Markov chains, but they differ according to important properties, such as compositionality, exp...