Learning context-free grammar rules from a set of program

The grammar of a programming language is important because it is used in developing program analysis and modification tools. Sometimes programs are written in dialects-minor variations of standard languages. Normally, grammars of standard languages are available but grammars of dialects may not be available. A technique for reverse engineering context-free grammar rules is presented. The proposed technique infers rules from a given set of programs and an approximate grammar is generated using an iterative approach with backtracking. The correctness of the approach, is explained and a set of optimisations proposed to make the approach more efficient. The approach and the optimisations are experimentally verified on a set of programming languages.     

CLP(ℛ) as a general finite element model definition language

There are today as many finite element input languages as there are finite element programs. These input languages were developed to serve one purpose: to provide the analyst with the means to convey the necessary analysis and design criteria to specific finite element programs. They were not developed as general finite element model-definition languages, and as a result their syntax and semantics are often unnatural and contrived. In this work we do not invent a new input language. Instead, we propose and evaluate the Contraint Logic Programming language CLP(?) as a general finite element model-definition and input language.     

Improving word coverage using unsupervised morphological analyser

Powerful computers are needed for processing tasks related to human languages these days. Human languages, also called natural languages, are highly versatile systems of encoding information and can capture information of various domains. To enable a computer to process information in human languages, the language needs to be appropriately ‘described’ to the computer, i.e. the language needs to be ‘modelled’. In this work, we present an approach for acquisition of morphology of inflectional language like Hindi. It is an unsupervised learning approach, suitable for languages with a rich concatenative morphology. Broadly, our work is carried out in three steps: 1. Acquire the morphology of Hindi from a raw (un annotated) Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore text corpus, 2. prepare clusters and prepare stem bag and suffix bag, 3. use the morphological knowledge to decompose given word as stems and suffixes according to their morphological behaviour and add new words. A prime motivation behind this work is to eventually develop an unsupervised morphological analyser which is language-independent (used for Hindi). Second motivation is to develop a Morphological segmentation which is language-independent as it is shown that study of morphology would benefit to a range of NLP tasks such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and information retrieval. Though Hindi is an important and a national language in India, little computational work has been done so far in this direction. Our work is one of the first efforts in this regard and can be considered pioneering. There are many such languages for which it is very important to have a suitable but inexpensive computational acquisition process. Languages receive very little attention of computational linguistic research both in terms of availability of funds and number of researchers. We however do not claim that our approach is a solution for all such languages. Different languages have characteristics that require individual research attention.     

Integration of safety analysis in model-driven software development

Safety critical software requires integrating verification techniques in software development methods. Software architectures must guarantee that developed systems will meet safety requirements and safety analyses are frequently used in the assessment. Safety engineers and software architects must reach a common understanding on an optimal architecture from both perspectives. Currently both groups of engineers apply different modelling techniques and languages: safety analysis models and software modelling languages. The solutions proposed seek to integrate both domains coupling the languages of each domain. It constitutes a sound example of the use of language engineering to improve efficiency in a software-related domain. A model-driven development approach and the use of a platform-independent language are used to bridge the gap between safety analyses (failure mode effects and criticality analysis and fault tree analysis) and software development languages (e.g. unified modelling language). Language abstract syntaxes (metamodels), profiles, language mappings (model transformations) and language refinements, support the direct application of safety analysis to software architectures for the verification of safety requirements. Model consistency and the possibility of automation are found among the benefits.     

The integration of manipulation and vision for assembly and quality control

The recent, development of industrial robots has produced quite powerful and cost-effective manipulators. Some crucial operations, as managing parts with random orientation or realigning pieces, can now be solved with the aid of vision systems connected with the manipulator. Quality control can be partially done during the assembly itself.

The solutions we may adopt to integrate manipulation and vision can be various. If we want to make it easy to program the system as a whole, with the same programming language, we should study solutions in which manipulation and vision use high-level languages To this end we will discuss how the choice of the programming language for the application programs is crucial.

The hardware and software structures of an operational example of such a system are presented. Examples of programs are given     

Evaluating formal properties of feature diagram languages

Feature diagrams (FDs) are a family of popular modelling languages, mainly used for managing variability in software product lines. FDs were first introduced by Kang et al. as part of the feature-oriented domain analysis (FODA) method back in 1990. Since then, various extensions of FODA FDs were devised to compensate for purported ambiguity and lack of precision and expressiveness. Recently, the authors surveyed these notations and provided them with a generic formal syntax and semantics, called free feature diagrams (FFDs). The authors also started investigating the comparative semantics of FFD with respect to other recent formalisations of FD languages. Those results were targeted at improving the quality of FD languages and making the comparison between them more objective. The previous results are recalled in a self-contained, better illustrated and better motivated fashion. Most importantly, a general method is presented for comparative semantics of FDs grounded in Harel and Rumpe's guidelines for defining formal visual languages and in Krogstie et al.'s semiotic quality framework. This method being actually applicable to other visual languages, FDs are also used as a language (re)engineering exemplar throughout the paper.     

Bridging WebML to model-driven engineering: from document type definitions to meta object facility

Meta-models are a prerequisite for model-driven engineering (MDE) in general and consequently for model-driven web engineering in particular. Various web modelling languages, however, are not based on meta-models and standards, like object management group's prominent meta object facility (MOF). Instead they define proprietary languages rather focused on notational aspects. Thus, MDE techniques and tools cannot be deployed for such languages preventing to exploit the full potential of MDE in terms of standardised storage, exchange and transformation of models. The WebML web modelling language is one example that does not yet rely on an explicit meta-model in the sense of MDE. Instead, it is defined in terms of a document type definition (DTD), and implicitly within the accompanying tool. Code generation then has to rely on model-to-code transformations based of extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT). We propose a meta-model for WebML to bridge WebML to MDE. To establish such a meta-model, instead of remodelling WebML's meta-model from scratch, a semi-automatic approach is provided that allows generating MOF-based meta-models on the basis of DTDs. The meta-model for WebML accomplishes the following aims: first, it represents an initial step towards a transition to employ MDE techniques within the WebML design methodology. Second, the provision of a MOF-based meta-model ensures interoperability with other MDE tools. Third, it represents an important step towards a common meta-model for Web modelling in future.     

The Impact Factor in non-English-speaking countries

The representativeness of the ISI-Thomson Impact Factor rankings and the existing relationship between countries?? national languages and the diffusion of scientific publications is analyzed. We discuss literature on the Impact Factor related to language use, publication strategies for authors and editors from non-English-speaking countries, the effects of the inclusion of a new journal in the ISI-Thomson databases and the scientific policies articulated in some non-English-speaking countries. The adoption of the Impact Factor as the valuation criterion for scientific activities has favoured the consolidation of English language journals in the diffusion of scientific knowledge. The vernacular languages only conserve part of their importance in certain disciplines, such as Clinical Medicine or Social Sciences and Humanities. The Impact Factor, invented over 50?years ago now, could be a limitation for non-English authors and scientific journals, and does not consider some widely used practices among the scientific community concerning the development of Internet as a means for the diffusion of knowledge.     

Refactoring to improve the understandability of specifications written in object constraint language

Object constraint language (OCL) is the object management group standard language for the precise specification of constraints associated with MetaObject facility specification-compliant models and metamodels. Although OCL has been created with the intention of being a simpler language when compared with traditional formal specification languages, it is common to find specifications containing OCL constraints that are difficult to understand and evolve. A set of potential problematic constructions often found in specifications written in OCL and a set of refactorings that can be applied to remove them are presented. We present an experimental study that has been performed to evaluate the effects of applying those strategies on the understandability of OCL specifications. The approach to provide automated support for OCL refactorings is also discussed.     

Foreign language learning: a deterrent or an incentive forengineering students?

The impression that some academics have about foreign language learning in engineering education is that it is irrelevant at worst, or an unnecessary additional workload for the students at best. The truth may be that engineering students have plenty to gain from the complementary aspects of languages and engineering at initial training level. The environment in which tomorrow's engineers will operate also encourages the introduction of languages as a mandatory subject into engineering courses. The article presents a number arguments showing that the combined national-communicative approach is particularly well-adapted to engineering students in terms of learning time and effort saved, confidence gained and motivation and interest aroused     

Language extinction and linguistic fronts

Language diversity has become greatly endangered in the past centuries owing to processes of language shift from indigenous languages to other languages that are seen as socially and economically more advantageous, resulting in the death or doom of minority languages. In this paper, we define a new language competition model that can describe the historical decline of minority languages in competition with more advantageous languages. We then implement this non-spatial model as an interaction term in a reaction–diffusion system to model the evolution of the two competing languages. We use the results to estimate the speed at which the more advantageous language spreads geographically, resulting in the shrinkage of the area of dominance of the minority language. We compare the results from our model with the observed retreat in the area of influence of the Welsh language in the UK, obtaining a good agreement between the model and the observed data.     

Object oriented matrix classes for use in a finite element code using C++

This paper presents a new method of writing finite element programs using the programming approach known as object oriented programming (OOP). More specifically, the C++ language is used to illustrate the key OOP concepts. In addition to the OOP finite element examples, a detailed discussion of OOP techniques in the creation of a generalized matrix library is presented. The C++ language is used in this paper because it is more suited to numerical programs than a pure OOP language such as Smalltalk. The efficiency, flexibility and maintainability of the C++ program are shown to be superior to a comparable version written in a non-OOP language, such as FORTRAN. The matrix library contains a number of matrix objects that are useful for specific types of matrix related problems. Different sparse storage schemes are implemented for each different type of matrix. A large number of functions are provided for each matrix type in order to implement many common matrix operations. In applications, the OOP paradigm allows the functions to be used in a very simple way that is common to all the matrix types. The sample finite element code included in this paper is primarily intended to illustrate the key concepts of OOP style. This paper explains how to set up a finite element hierarchy, material hierarchy and how to integrate this with the matrix hierarchy (library). Thus, a completely object oriented finite element program can be written.     

Ontology-based approach to Basic Grafcet formalization

In recent years, various proposals have been put forth to formalize the Grafcet graphical language. The objective of this paper is to propose an ontology-based approach to formalize this language. The authors have implemented a semi-coarse grain ontology written in Ontology Web Language and have tested it by including it in an existing educational tool for the teaching of Grafcet language for use in programmable logic controllers.     

Malagasy dialects and the peopling of Madagascar

The origin of Malagasy DNA is half African and half Indonesian, nevertheless the Malagasy language, spoken by the entire population, belongs to the Austronesian family. The language most closely related to Malagasy is Maanyan (Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family), but related languages are also in Sulawesi, Malaysia and Sumatra. For this reason, and because Maanyan is spoken by a population which lives along the Barito river in Kalimantan and which does not possess the necessary skill for long maritime navigation, the ethnic composition of the Indonesian colonizers is still unclear. There is a general consensus that Indonesian sailors reached Madagascar by a maritime trek, but the time, the path and the landing area of the first colonization are all disputed. In this research, we try to answer these problems together with other ones, such as the historical configuration of Malagasy dialects, by types of analysis related to lexicostatistics and glottochronology that draw upon the automated method recently proposed by the authors. The data were collected by the first author at the beginning of 2010 with the invaluable help of Joselinà Soafara Néré and consist of Swadesh lists of 200 items for 23 dialects covering all areas of the island.     

An Efficient Hybrid Model for Arabic Text Recognition

In recent years, Deep Learning models have become indispensable in several fields such as computer vision, automatic object recognition, and automatic natural language processing. The implementation of a robust and efficient handwritten text recognition system remains a challenge for the research community in this field, especially for the Arabic language, which, compared to other languages, has a dearth of published works. In this work, we presented an efficient and new system for offline Arabic handwritten text recognition. Our new approach is based on the combination of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Bidirectional Long-Term Memory (BLSTM) followed by a Connectionist Temporal Classification layer (CTC). Moreover, during the training phase of the model, we introduce an algorithm of data augmentation to increase the quality of data. Our proposed approach can recognize Arabic handwritten texts without the need to segment the characters, thus overcoming several problems related to this point. To train and test (evaluate) our approach, we used two Arabic handwritten text recognition databases, which are IFN/ENIT and KHATT. The Experimental results show that our new approach, compared to other methods in the literature, gives better results.     

Spoken Indian language identification: a review of features and databases

Spoken language is one of the distinctive characteristics of the human race. Spoken language processing is a branch of computer science that plays an important role in human–computer interaction (HCI), which has made remarkable advancement in the last two decades. This paper reviews and summarizes the acoustic, phonetic and prosody features that have been used for spoken language identification specifically for Indian languages. In addition, we also review the speech databases, which are already available for Indian languages and can be used for the purposes of spoken language identification.     

Integrating Deep Learning and Machine Translation for Understanding Unrefined Languages

In the field of natural language processing (NLP), the advancement of neural machine translation has paved the way for cross-lingual research. Yet, most studies in NLP have evaluated the proposed language models on well-refined datasets. We investigate whether a machine translation approach is suitable for multilingual analysis of unrefined datasets, particularly, chat messages in Twitch. In order to address it, we collected the dataset, which included 7,066,854 and 3,365,569 chat messages from English and Korean streams, respectively. We employed several machine learning classifiers and neural networks with two different types of embedding: word-sequence embedding and the final layer of a pre-trained language model. The results of the employed models indicate that the accuracy difference between English, and English to Korean was relatively high, ranging from 3% to 12%. For Korean data (Korean, and Korean to English), it ranged from 0% to 2%. Therefore, the results imply that translation from a low-resource language (e.g., Korean) into a high-resource language (e.g., English) shows higher performance, in contrast to vice versa. Several implications and limitations of the presented results are also discussed. For instance, we suggest the feasibility of translation from resource-poor languages for using the tools of resource-rich languages in further analysis.     

A Simulation Generator for Flexible Manufacturing Systems Design and Control

Recent developments in simulation languages have enabled the modeling of complex and large systems. Systems modeling using simulation has many advantages. Even though the creation of realistic models using a simulation language is becoming easier, it is not trivial. Simulation languages are not designed to be problem-specific. Furthermore, the art of systems modeling can be quite time consuming.

This paper describes a user-oriented simulation generator for the design and control of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). The simulation generator serves as a preprocessor to the SIM AN simulation language. The generator converts data into a simulation model and automatically runs the simulation program. Standard output is provided by the simulation program, as well as plots and histograms of performance measures of interest to the analyst.

Model development is significantly simplified by the simulation generator described in this paper. Simulation generators can be developed in a relatively short period of time by using an existing simulation language. Simulation generators represent a very attractive alternative to specialized simulation languages.