Successful software projects depend on the quality of software requirements. Creating high-quality requirements is a crucial step toward successful software development. Effective support in this area can significantly reduce development costs and enhance the software quality. In this paper, we introduce and assess the capabilities of a Large Language Model (LLM) to evaluate the quality characteristics of software requirements according to the ISO 29148 standard. We aim to further improve the support of stakeholders engaged in requirements engineering (RE). We show how an LLM can assess requirements, explain its decision-making process, and examine its capacity to propose improved versions of requirements. We conduct a study with software engineers to validate our approach. Our findings emphasize the potential of LLMs for improving the quality of software requirements.

Recommender systems play an important role in supporting the achievement of the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). In recommender systems, explanations can support different goals, such as increasing a user’s trust in a recommendation, persuading a user to purchase specific items, or increasing the understanding of the reasons behind a recommendation. In this paper, we discuss the concept of "sustainability-aware persuasive explanations" which we regard as a major concept to support the achievement of the mentioned SDGs. Such explanations are orthogonal to most existing explanation approaches since they focus on a "less is more" principle, which per se is not included in existing e-commerce platforms. Based on a user study in three item domains, we analyze the potential impacts of sustainability-aware persuasive explanations. The study results are promising regarding user acceptance and the potential impacts of such explanations.

Abstract Sports recommender systems receive an increasing attention due to their potential of fostering healthy living, improving personal well-being, and increasing performances in sports. These systems support people in sports, for example, by the recommendation of healthy and performance-boosting food items, the recommendation of training practices, talent and team recommendation, and the recommendation of specific tactics in competitions. With applications in the virtual world, for example, the recommendation of maps or opponents in e-sports, these systems already transcend conventional sports scenarios where physical presence is needed. On the basis of different examples, we present an overview of sports recommender systems applications and techniques. Overall, we analyze the related state-of-the-art and discuss future research directions.

Persuasive XAI, also known as Persuasive Explainable Artificial Intelligence, refers to the combination of two concepts: explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and persuasive technology. Persuasive XAI can be applied in decision-support systems in the healthcare domain in various ways to enhance the perception of patients about the outcomes, encourage adherence to treatment plans, and improve overall patient or clinician engagement. In this paper, we aim to analyze state-of-the-art persuasion strategies used in XAI and discuss how to apply them in Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) to support clinicians and patients in making healthcare-related decisions.

Abstract Configuration systems must be able to deal with inconsistencies which can occur in different contexts. Especially in interactive settings, where users specify requirements and a constraint solver has to identify solutions, inconsistencies may more often arise. In inconsistency situations, there is a need of diagnosis methods that support the identification of minimal sets of constraints that have to be adapted or deleted in order to restore consistency. A diagnosis algorithm’s performance can be evaluated in terms of time to find a diagnosis (runtime) and diagnosis quality. Runtime efficiency of diagnosis is especially crucial in real-time scenarios such as production scheduling, robot control, and communication networks. However, there is a trade off between diagnosis quality and the runtime efficiency of diagnostic reasoning. In this article, we deal with solving the quality-runtime performance trade off problem of direct diagnosis. In this context, we propose a novel learning approach based on matrix factorization for constraint ordering. We show that our approach improves runtime performance and diagnosis quality at the same time.

Abstract Constraint solving is applied in different application contexts. Examples thereof are the configuration of complex products and services, the determination of production schedules, and the determination of recommendations in online sales scenarios. Constraint solvers apply, for example, search heuristics to assure adequate runtime performance and prediction quality. Several approaches have already been developed showing that machine learning (ML) can be used to optimize search processes in constraint solving. In this article, we provide an overview of the state of the art in applying ML approaches to constraint solving problems including constraint satisfaction, SAT solving, answer set programming (ASP) and applications thereof such as configuration, constraint-based recommendation, and model-based diagnosis. We compare and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and point out relevant directions for future work.

Abstract User preferences are a crucial input needed by recommender systems to determine relevant items. In single-shot recommendation scenarios such as content-based filtering and collaborative filtering, user preferences are represented, for example, askeywords,categories, anditem ratings. In conversational recommendation approaches such as constraint-based and critiquing-based recommendation, user preferences are often represented on the semantic level in terms ofitem attribute valuesandcritiques. In this article, we provide an overview of preference representations used in different types of recommender systems. In this context, we take into account the fact thatpreferences aren’t stablebut are ratherconstructedwithin the scope of a recommendation process. In which way preferences are determined and adapted is influenced by various factors such aspersonality traits,emotional states, andcognitive biases. We summarize preference construction related research and also discuss aspects of counteracting cognitive biases.

Constraint-based group recommender systems support the identification of items that best match the individual preferences of all group members. In cases where the requirements of the group members are inconsistent with the underlying constraint set, the group needs to be supported such that an appropriate solution can be found. In this paper, we present a guided approach that determines socially-aware diagnoses based on different aggregation functions. We analyzed the prediction quality of different aggregation functions by using data collected in a user study. The results indicate that those diagnoses guided by the Least Misery aggregation function achieve a higher prediction quality compared to the Average Voting, Most Pleasure, and Majority Voting. Moreover, another major outcome of our work reveals that diagnoses based on aggregation functions outperform basic approaches such as Breadth First Search and Direct Diagnosis.

The Internet Of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that envisions a networked infrastructure enabling different types of devices to be interconnected. It creates different kinds of artifacts (e.g., services and applications) in various application domains such as health monitoring, sports monitoring, animal monitoring, enhanced retail services, and smart homes. Recommendation technologies can help to more easily identify relevant artifacts and thus will become one of the key technologies in future IoT solutions. In this article, we provide an overview of existing applications of recommendation technologies in the IoT context and present new recommendation techniques on the basis of real-world IoT scenarios.

Abstract Many domains require scalable algorithms that help to determine diagnoses efficiently and often within predefined time limits. Anytime diagnosis is able to determine solutions in such a way and thus is especially useful in real-time scenarios such as production scheduling, robot control, and communication networks management where diagnosis and corresponding reconfiguration capabilities play a major role. Anytime diagnosis in many cases comes along with a trade-off between diagnosis quality and the efficiency of diagnostic reasoning. In this paper we introduce and analyze FlexDiag which is an anytime direct diagnosis approach. We evaluate the algorithm with regard to performance and diagnosis quality using a configuration benchmark from the domain of feature models and an industrial configuration knowledge base from the automotive domain. Results show that FlexDiag helps to significantly increase the performance of direct diagnosis search with corresponding quality tradeoffs in terms of minimality and accuracy.