The French National MT-Project: Technical organization and translation results of CALLIOPE-AERO

The software and lingware aspects of the CALLIOPE-AERO system derive from those of the laboratory prototypes developed at GETA (Grenoble University).¹ The basic MT software, ARIANE-78, has been augmented with a translator workstation and a lexical database system from which the MT dictionaries are generated. The architecture of the lingware was designed by Professor Bernard Vauquois. For the first time, development has begun with the systematic construction of two static grammars for French and English, before any programming of dynamic grammars.CALLIOPE-AERO aims at translating aviation manuals from French into English. The lingware, written in the SLLPs (Specialized Languages for Linguistic Programming) supported by ARIANE-78, now totals 22,500 lines for the grammars and 54,000 lines for the dictionaries (roughly 14,000 terms), which continue to expand rapidly.In-house testing of CALLIOPE-AERO has begun at an industrial site. The overall quality of the translation results produced so far makes it quite probable that acceptability by translators and cost-effectiveness will be attained in a real setting.Another system, CALLIOPE-COMP, is now in the development stage. Its aim is to translate computer-related material from English into French.     

Replaying development history to assess the effectiveness of change propagation tools

As developers modify software entities such as functions or variables to introduce new features, enhance old ones, or fix bugs, they must ensure that other entities in the software system are updated to be consistent with these new changes. Many hard to find bugs are introduced by developers who did not notice dependencies between entities, and failed to propagate changes correctly. Most modern development environments offer tools to assist developers in propagating changes. For example, dependency browsers show static code dependencies between source code entities. Other sources of information such as historical co-change or code layout information could be used by tools to support developers in propagating changes. We present the Development Replay (DR) approach which empirically assess and compares the effectiveness of several not-yet-existing change propagation tools by reenacting the changes stored in source control repositories using these tools. We present a case study of five large open source systems with a total of over 40 years of development history. Our empirical results show that historical co-change information recovered from source control repositories along with code layout information can guide developers in propagating changes better than simple static dependency information.

Machine assisted translation from English to a Slavic language

The paper discusses a methodology of machine assisted translation (MAT) as an alternative to fully automatic MT. A prototype MAT system is described, which is an integration of a dictionary database system and a text editor. The functional requests for such a system from the linguistic point of view and some general problems of designing and implementing such systems are presented. Special attention is given to language-dependence, and to the problem of completeness and efficiency of the linguistic data representation for a very simple system. A statistic analysis of English inflexion and word derivation patterns is presented.     

Evaluation of MT systems: A programmatic view

Conclusions In this paper, I have tried to make several points.First, I have argued that the Human Translator Metaphor does not provide the most fruitful approach to evaluation of MT systems or perhaps even to the design of MT systems in general — one should rather go for specialized systems, whose properties are negotiated between designers and users.Second, I have tried to emphasise the dangers which the gear box evaluation syndrome raises in evaluating MT systems.Third, I have suggested an alternative basis for evaluation: rather than MT systems being seen as simply devices, they should be seen as pairs Specs,Device, where the Specs constitute the fixed point for evaluation, and evaluation is seen in terms of both conformity checking between Device and Specs, and usefulness checking via comparison of user requirements and Specs. Though this raises some questions, I have tried to answer the most pressing worries one might have with the proposal, however, it is clear that this approach requires some effort to be put into specification methods and languages for specialized MT systems.     

Acquisition of large lexicons for practical knowledge-based MT

Although knowledge-based MT systems have the potential to achieve high translation accuracy, each successful application system requires a large amount of hand-coded lexical knowledge. Systems like KBMT-89 and its descendents have demonstrated how knowledge-based translation can produce good results in technical domains with tractable domain semantics. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the development task for large-scale applications with tens of thousands of domain concepts precludes a purely hand-crafted approach. The current challenge for the next generation of knowledge-based MT systems is to utilize on-line textual resources and corpus analysis software in order to automate the most laborious aspects of the knowledge acquisition process. This partial automation can in turn maximize the productivity of human knowledge engineers and help to make large-scale applications of knowledge-based MT an viable approach. In this paper we discuss the corpus-based knowledge acquisition methodology used in KANT, a knowledge-based translation system for multilingual document production. This methodology can be generalized beyond the KANT interlingua approach for use with any system that requires similar kinds of knowledge.     

Web accessibility in the Mid-Atlantic United States: a study of 50 homepages

This paper reports on a study of 50 homepages in the Mid-Atlantic United States to determine what accessibility problems exist. The 50 homepages were evaluated using both the U.S. governments Section 508 guidelines as well as the Web Accessibility Initiatives (WAI) Priority Level 1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). According to both sets of guidelines, 49 out of 50 sites were found to have accessibility problems, although some of the accessibility problems were minor and easy to fix. There are two troubling findings from this study. The Web sites that had the most accessibility problems were organizations in the Web development and information technology field, which ideally should be the leaders in making the Web more accessible. The Web accessibility software testing tools, which are available to assist people in making their Web sites more accessible, are flawed and inconsistent and require large numbers of manual checks, which many developers may not be able to do. More people need to become aware of the topic of Web accessibility, and the testing tools need to be improved so that once people are aware, it is easier for them to move their sites toward full accessibility.     

The need for a socio-cultural perspective in the implementation of virtual environments

For many researchers, virtual reality (VR) is first of all a technology. This vision is also well reflected in the growing research work concerned with virtual environments: most of it has been addressed primarily the development of new rendering technologies rather than the highly interactive and dynamic nature of user-system interaction that VR supports. However, this focus on technology is disappointing for developers and researchers. To overcome this limitation, this paper describes VR as an advanced communication tool: a communication interface in single-user VR, and a communication medium in the case of multi-user VR. This leads us to propose acultural concept of presence as a social construction. Lying at the base of this view are two elements that guarantee an elevated sense of presence: acultural framework and the possibility ofnegotiation, both of actions and of their meaning. Within this view, experiencing presence and telepresence does not depend so much on the faithfulness of the reproduction of physical aspects of external reality as on the capacity of simulation to produce a context in which social actors may communicate and cooperate. The consequences of this approach for the design and the development of VR systems are presented.The first author is responsible for the preparation of Section 3. The second author prepared Section 2. Introduction and Conclusions were prepared by both authors. Moreover, to both authors must be attributed the definition of contents and the final structure of the paper.     

On the linguistic nature of cyberspace and virtual communities

This paper argues for a linguistic explanation of the nature of Virtual Communities. Virtual Communities develop and grow in electronic space. or cyberspace. Authors such as Benedikt Meyrowitz and Mitchell have theorised about the nature of electronic space whilst Lefebvre. Popper, Hakim Bey (aka Lamborn Wilson) and Kuhn have theorised more generally about the nature of space. Extending this tradition and the works of these authors, this paper presents a language based perspective on the nature of electronic spaces. Behaviour in cyberspace is based on and regulated by hardware, software tools and interfaces. A definition of electronic space cannot be given beyond its linguistic characteristics, which underlie and sustain it. The author believes that the more users and developers understand the relationship between language and cyberspace, the more they will be able to use specific metaphors for dwelling and inhabiting it. In particular, MUDs/MOOs and the Web are interesting places for testing and observing social behaviours and dynamics.     

Large-Scale Dictionary Construction for Foreign Language Tutoring and Interlingual Machine Translation

This paper describes techniques for automatic construction of dictionaries for use in large-scale foreign language tutoring (FLT) and interlingual machine translation (MT) systems. The dictionaries are based on a language-independent representation called lexical conceptual structure (LCS). A primary goal of the LCS research is to demonstrate that synonymous verb senses share distributional patterns. We show how the syntax–semantics relation can be used to develop a lexical acquisition approach that contributes both toward the enrichment of existing online resources and toward the development of lexicons containing more complete information than is provided in any of these resources alone. We start by describing the structure of the LCS and showing how this representation is used in FLT and MT. We then focus on the problem of building LCS dictionaries for large-scale FLT and MT. First, we describe authoring tools for manual and semi-automatic construction of LCS dictionaries; we then present a more sophisticated approach that uses linguistic techniques for building word definitions automatically. These techniques have been implemented as part of a set of lexicon-development tools used in the milt FLT project.     

Performance and energy impact of parallelization and vectorization techniques in modern microprocessors

While Moore’s law states that the number of transistors is approximately doubled every 2 years, powering these transistors simultaneously is only possible as long as Dennard scaling continues. Unfortunately, voltage scaling has slowed down in recent years, and microprocessor designers have hit what is known as the “utilization wall” or the “dark silicon” effect. Vectorization, parallelization, specialization and heterogeneity are the key approaches to deal with this utilization wall. However, how software developers can maximize energy efficiency of these architectures remains an open question. This paper presents an energy evaluation of parallelization using both physical and logical cores (i.e., SMT/Hyper-Threading), vectorization (SSE, Advanced Vector Extensions and NEON) and dynamic core reconfiguration [ \(\hbox {Intel}^{\circledR }\) ’s Turbo Boost Technology (TBT)]. The evaluation spans microprocessors for embedded, laptop, desktop and server markets, since there is a convergence among them towards energy efficiency. The analyzed processors include Intel’s Core \(^\mathrm{TM}\) i5 and i7 family and ARM \(^{\circledR }\) ’s Cortex \(^\mathrm{TM}\) A9 and A15. Results show that software developers should prioritize vectorization over thread parallelism when possible, as it yields better energy efficiency, especially on the Intel platforms. Application scalability can be reduced drastically when using vectorization and threading simultaneously since vectorization increases pressure on the memory subsystem. Intel’s TBT further improves energy efficiency by an additional 10–20 % depending on the number of active threads.     

An empirical study of Android Wear user complaints

Wearable apps are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. Nevertheless, to date, very few studies have examined the issues that wearable apps face. Prior studies showed that user reviews contain a plethora of insights that can be used to understand quality issues and help developers build better quality mobile apps. Therefore, in this paper, we mine user reviews in order to understand the user complaints about wearable apps. We manually sample and categorize 2,667 reviews from 19 Android wearable apps. Additionally, we examine the replies posted by developers in response to user complaints. This allows us to determine the type of complaints that developers care about the most, and to identify problems that despite being important to users, do not receive a proper response from developers. Our findings indicate that the most frequent complaints are related to Functional Errors, Cost, and Lack of Functionality, whereas the most negatively impacting complaints are related to Installation Problems, Device Compatibility, and Privacy & Ethical Issues. We also find that developers mostly reply to complaints related to Privacy & Ethical Issues, Performance Issues, and notification related issues. Furthermore, we observe that when developers reply, they tend to provide a solution, request more details, or let the user know that they are working on a solution. Lastly, we compare our findings on wearable apps with the study done by Khalid et al. (2015) on handheld devices. From this, we find that some complaint types that appear in handheld apps also appear in wearable apps; though wearable apps have unique issues related to Lack of Functionality, Installation Problems, Connection & Sync, Spam Notifications, and Missing Notifications. Our results highlight the issues that users of wearable apps face the most, and the issues to which developers should pay additional attention to due to their negative impact.     

Information Sharing via Projection Function for Coexistence of Robot and Human

Various kinds of service robots will be used in environment coexisting with humans. To realize the coexistence of a robot and a human, the robot must share task information with the person via an adequate interface. We propose a projection function as the interface for information sharing. We construct a projection system to prove the information sharing efficiency, and develop several modes of interaction between the robot and the human in the projection system.     

Perceptions of software quality: a pilot study

Many software quality initiatives fail because they do not take account of the range of views that people have of quality. New approaches to software quality improvement will not work unless software developers believe in them, no matter how enthusiastic managers may be. This paper reports on a pilot study using the repertory grid technique that found evidence to support these assertions. The study findings justify further work and show that while the repertory grid technique is an appropriate instrument in this area it is resource intensive to apply and may not be practical in a wider study of a representative sample of the IT industry. The paper has practical recommendations for successful introduction of new software quality programmes. These recommendations stress the need for effective communication, leading to a shared understanding of quality, and for realistic goals that recognize the pressure of development schedules.     

Getting the most from map data structures in Android

A map is a data structure that is commonly used to store data as key–value pairs and retrieve data as keys, values, or key–value pairs. Although Java offers different map implementation classes, Android SDK offers other implementations supposed to be more efficient than HashMap: ArrayMap and SparseArray variants (SparseArray, LongSparseArray, SparseIntArray, SparseLongArray, and SparseBooleanArray). Yet, the performance of these implementations in terms of CPU time, memory usage, and energy consumption is lacking in the official Android documentation; although saving CPU, memory, and energy is a major concern of users wanting to increase battery life. Consequently, we study the use of map implementations by Android developers in two ways. First, we perform an observational study of 5713 Android apps in GitHub. Second, we conduct a survey to assess developers’ perspective on Java and Android map implementations. Then, we perform an experimental study comparing HashMap, ArrayMap, and SparseArray variants map implementations in terms of CPU time, memory usage, and energy consumption. We conclude with guidelines for choosing among the map implementations: HashMap is preferable over ArrayMap to improve energy efficiency of apps, and SparseArray variants should be used instead of HashMap and ArrayMap when keys are primitive types.     

Current MT research orientation/disorientation

Conclusion Somers' article brings into focus the state of technology in the subject of MT. In a certain measure, the reflection of Somers despite nearly 25 years since the ALPAC report...for all the investment...perhaps one could have expected better results should be applied not only to MT systems, but equally to NLP systems. However, this reflection of Somers should be interpreted and reevaluated in accordance with the distance between the evolution of our knowledge of the mecanisms of translatology and the ambitious objectives of producing FAHQT for more than 80% of sentences in unrestricted texts.For the future of MT, specialists must play a double role (at the same time, scientific and economic) so as to make the right compromise at all times between language, which is a bottomless pit, and its users, who are clients with restricted R & D funds.     

On fuzzy equality and approximation in fuzzy logic

The paper is a contribution to the theory of fuzzy logic in narrow sense with evaluated syntax (FLn). We show that the concepts of fuzzy equality and the provability degree enable to generalize the concept of fuzzy approximation. In the second part of the paper we return to the Mamdani-Assilian formula, which is formed on the basis of the so called totally bounded fuzzy equality and using which we can approximate any function with the prescribed accuracy.This paper has been supported by Grant A1187901/99 of the GA AV R and the project VS96037 of MMT of the Czech Republic.     

Model-driven assessment of system dependability

Designers of complex real-time systems need to address dependability requirements early on in the development process. This paper presents a model-based approach that allows developers to analyse the dependability of use cases and to discover more reliable and safe ways of designing the interactions of the system with the environment. The hardware design and the dependability of the hardware to be used also needs to be considered. We use a probabilistic extension of statecharts to formally model the interaction requirements defined in the use cases. The model is then evaluated analytically based on the success and failure probabilities of events. The analysis may lead to further refinement of the use cases by introducing detection and recovery measures to ensure dependable system interaction. A visual modelling environment for our extended statecharts formalism supporting automatic probability analysis has been implemented in AToM³, A Tool for Multi-formalism and Meta-Modelling. Our approach is illustrated with an elevator control system case study.

Prompter

Developers often require knowledge beyond the one they possess, which boils down to asking co-workers for help or consulting additional sources of information, such as Application Programming Interfaces (API) documentation, forums, and Q&A websites. However, it requires time and energy to formulate one’s problem, peruse and process the results. We propose a novel approach that, given a context in the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), automatically retrieves pertinent discussions from Stack Overflow, evaluates their relevance using a multi-faceted ranking model, and, if a given confidence threshold is surpassed, notifies the developer. We have implemented our approach in Prompter, an Eclipse plug-in. Prompter was evaluated in two empirical studies. The first study was aimed at evaluatingPrompter’s ranking model and involved 33 participants. The second study was conducted with 12 participants and aimed at evaluating Prompter’s usefulness when supporting developers during development and maintenance tasks. Since Prompter uses “volatile information” crawled from the web, we also replicated Study I after one year to assess the impact of such a “volatility” on recommenders like Prompter. Our results indicate that (i) Prompter recommendations were positively evaluated in 74 % of the cases on average, (ii) Prompter significantly helps developers to improve the correctness of their tasks by 24 % on average, but also (iii) 78 % of the provided recommendations are “volatile” and can change at one year of distance. While Prompter revealed to be effective, our studies also point out issues when building recommenders based on information available on online forums.