Although overlap between specifications – that is the incorporation of elements which designate common features of the domain of discourse – is a prerequisite for specification inconsistency, it has only been a side concern in requirements engineering research. This paper discusses overlap, points out the complicating factors in its identification an outlines the key components of a programme o...

RST-style document-level discourse parsing remains a difficult task and efficient deep learning models on this task have rarely been presented. In this paper, we propose an attention-based hierarchical neural network model for discourse parsing. We also incorporate tensor-based transformation function to model complicated feature interactions. Experimental results show that our approach obtains...

Implicit discourse relation recognition is an extremely challenging task, for it lacks of explicit connectives between two arguments. Currently, most methods to address this problem can be regarded as to solve it in two stages, the first is to extract features from two arguments separately, and the next is to apply those features to some standard classifier. However, during the first stage, tho...

In this paper, we invite the engineering design research community to examine the current state of the engineering design lexicon. We expose the nature and the persuasiveness of practices that may hinder intelligible discourse within the engineering design literature. In particular, we show how such commonly used terms as criterion and metric are used sometimes as synonyms and sometimes not, of...

Educational institutions have historically struggled with retaining women in engineering. A significant drop occurs in the first year of undergraduate studies. In response, some universities have modified firstyear curricula to include more teamwork and collaboration. Using epistemic frame theory, we hypothesize that more women would remain in the field if they had authentic experiences of the ...

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to be discourse connectives signalling discourse relations between adjacent discourse units are instead anaphors. We do this by (i) demonstrating their behavioral similarity with more common anaphors (pronouns and definite NPs); (ii) presenting a general framework for understanding anaphora into which they nicely fit; (ii...