Automated software verification systems, that try to prove the correctness of a program, use specifications in the code as a base to verify said program. When this specification includes calls to sideeffect free methods, the verification system might want to use the specification of these side-effect free methods to have more information available for its correctness proofs. Unfortunately, the ...

1. Introduction Not all words, real or novel, are created equal — some sound better than others, either for phonological or for morphological reasons. That is, well-formedness is a gradient notion. One simple way to measure gradient well-formedness is through acceptability ratings. For example, native English speakers generally agree that there are several conceivable past tenses for the made-u...

Contract languages such as JML and Spec# specify invariants and preand postconditions using side-effect free expressions of the programming language, in particular, pure methods. For such contracts to be meaningful, they must be well-formed: First, they must respect the partiality of operations, for instance, the preconditions of pure methods used in the contract. Second, they must enable a con...

The cognitively based knowledge representation introduced in this paper enables specifications obtained in elicitation processes as well as the processes themselves to be verified for wellformedness from a semiotic point of view. By simultaneously elaborating objectand meta-level interpretations of a problem, the proposed theory may help speed up requirement elicitation thereby increase its eff...