Controlled Translation in an Example-based Environment: What do Automatic Evaluation Metrics Tell Us?

This paper presents an extended, harmonised account of our previous work on integrating controlled language data in an Example-based Machine Translation system. Gough and Way in MT Summit pp. 133–140 (2003) focused on controlling the output text in a novel manner, while Gough and Way (9th Workshop of the EAMT, (2004a), pp. 73–81) sought to constrain the input strings according to controlled language specifications. Our original sub-sentential alignment algorithm could deal only with 1:1 matches, but subsequent refinements enabled n:m alignments to be captured. A direct consequence was that we were able to populate the system’s databases with more than six times as many potentially useful fragments. Together with two simple novel improvements – correcting a small number of mistranslations in the lexicon, and allowing multiple translations in the lexicon – translation quality improves considerably. We provide detailed automatic and human evaluations of a number of experiments carried out to test the quality of the system. We observe that our system outperforms the rule-based on-line system Logomedia on a range of automatic evaluation metrics, and that the ‘best’ translation candidate is consistently highly ranked by our system. Finally, we note in a number of tests that the BLEU metric gives objectively different results than other automatic evaluation metrics and a manual evaluation. Despite these conflicting results, we observe a preference for controlling the source data rather than the target translations.     

What to Tell About Me? Self‐Presentation in Online Communities

This paper investigates how the type of community and personal goals affect self‐presentation. In 3 online studies, we simulated the registration process in online communities, presenting either a common‐bond or a common‐identity community. Study 1 confirmed that members of the common‐bond community presented themselves in an individualizing manner, while members of the common‐identity community focused on characteristics shared among members of the community. Study 2 investigated underlying processes, showing that the goal to get in contact with other members was less salient in the common‐identity than in the common‐bond community. Study 3 demonstrated that community members actively manage their self‐presentation in accordance with personal goals. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for research and profile design.     

A Note on the Difference between the Camera Resection and the PnP Problem

The camera resection and the PnP problem are both of great importance in computer vision field.However,these two fundamentally different problems are often mistaken one another in the literature.In this short note,the essential differences of these two problems are clarified,and such a clarification seems helpful for those who are working on the problems.     

XML and PKI — What’s the story?

This article discusses how XML technology relates to public key infrastructure, PKI. The bottom line is that today XML doesn’t replace what PKI does, but will provide a new set of ways of interfacing with existing PKI technology via XKMS. Current PKI will remain the technology of choice for certain types of applications, in particular wireless infrastructure, whereas, in perhaps a year or so, a new type of XML security infrastructure will evolve to cater for XML-oriented applications.     

Collaboration Exercises: What Do They Contribute?

This article aims to study whether exercises contribute to learning that can be useful in actual emergency work. It reports the findings of a study about professional emergency personnel's perceptions of the impact of collaboration exercises. Surveys were distributed and collected from emergency personnel in conjunction with three collaboration exercises that took place in Sweden in spring 2012. The survey included personnel holding different positions within the police department, fire department and ambulance services. Among them were also operational personnel such as officers. A total of 94 professional emergency personnel agreed to participate by answering the survey. The response rate was 95%. The study shows that collaborative elements in exercises contribute to perceived learning (R² = 0:53), and that learning, in turn, has a perceived beneficial effect on actual emergency work (R² = 0:26). The perceived results of collaboration, learning and their impact on actual emergency work, however, are moderate. The exercises were characterised by long waiting times and gave few opportunities to practise different strategies. Only a few respondents felt that they learned something about the collaborating organisations' ways of communicating and prioritising. Many also thought that the exercises were more useful for command officers than for operational personnel. Thus, the study shows that by strengthening the collaborative elements of the exercises, the perception of the participants' actual emergency work can be developed.     

What Would Edmonds Do? Augmenting Paths and Witnesses for Degree-Bounded MSTs

Given a graph and degree upper bounds on vertices, the BDMST problem requires us to find a minimum cost spanning tree respecting the given degree bounds. This problem generalizes the Travelling Salesman Path Problem (TSPP), even in unweighted graphs, and so we expect that it is necessary to relax the degree constraints to get efficient algorithms. Könemann and Ravi (Proceedings of the Thirty Second Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 537–546, 2000; Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 389–395, 2003) give bicriteria approximation algorithms for the problem using local search techniques of Fischer (Technical Report 14853, Cornell University, 1993). Their algorithms find solutions which make a tradeoff of the approximation factor for the cost of the resulting tree against the factor by which degree constraints are violated. In particular, they give an algorithm which, for a graph with a spanning tree of cost C and degree B, and for parameters b,w>1, produces a tree whose cost is at most wC and whose degree is at most \(\frac{w}{w-1}bB+\log_{b}n.\) A primary contribution of Könemann and Ravi is to use a Lagrangean relaxation to formally relate the BDMST problem to what we call the MDMST problem, which is the problem of finding an MST of minimum degree in a graph. In their solution to the MDMST problem, they make central use of a local-search approximation algorithm of Fischer.In this paper, we give the first approximation algorithms for the BDMST problem—both our algorithms find trees of optimal cost. We achieve this improvement using a primal-dual cost bounding methodology from Edmonds’ weighted matching algorithms which was not previously used in this context. In order to follow Edmonds’ approach, we develop algorithms for a variant of the MDMST problem in which there are degree lower bound requirements. This variant may be of independent interest; in particular, our results extend to a generalized version of the BDMST problem in which both upper and lower degree bounds are given.First we give a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a tree of optimal cost and with maximum degree at most \(\frac{b}{2-b}B+O(\log_{b}n)\) for any b∈(1,2). We also give a quasi-polynomial-time approximation algorithm which produces a tree of optimal cost C and maximum degree at most B+O(log?n/log?log?n). That is, the error is additive as well as restricted just to the degree. This further improvement in degree is obtained by using augmenting-path techniques that search over a larger solution space than Fischer’s local-search algorithm.     

What Do We Know about Developer Motivation?

Software engineers will do better work and stay with a company if they are motivated—as a result the success of software projects is likely to improve. The authors use the findings from their in-depth review of the 92 studies published in the last 25 years on software engineer motivation to give an overview of what managers need to know to improve motivation among their employees.     

What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Technology Pivots? – A Delphi Study

Technology pivots were designed to help digital startups make adjustments to the technology underpinning their products and services. While academia and the media make liberal use of the term “technology pivot,” they rarely align themselves to Ries’ foundational conceptualization. Recent research suggests that a more granulated conceptualization of technology pivots is required. To scientifically derive a comprehensive conceptualization, we conduct a Delphi study with a panel of 38 experts drawn from academia and practice to explore their understanding of “technology pivots.” Our study thus makes an important contribution to advance the seminal work by Ries on technology pivots.     

What Do We Know about Agile Software Development?

From 1,996 studies available in the agile software development literature, the authors identified 36 research studies of acceptable rigor, credibility, and relevance to include in a systematic review of empirical evidence for agile development's benefits and limitations. The review results suggest that despite some limitations, agile development can improve job satisfaction, project productivity, and customer satisfaction.     

What Are They Talking About? Analyzing Code Reviews in Pull-Based Development Model

Code reviews in pull-based model are open to community users on GitHub. Various participants are taking part in the review discussions and the review topics are not only about the improvement of code contributions but also about project evolution and social interaction. A comprehensive understanding of the review topics in pull-based model would be useful to better organize the code review process and optimize review tasks such as reviewer recommendation and pull-request prioritization. In this paper, we first conduct a qualitative study on three popular open-source software projects hosted on GitHub and construct a fine-grained two-level taxonomy covering four level-1 categories (code correctness, pull-request decision-making, project management, and social interaction) and 11 level-2 subcategories (e.g., defect detecting, reviewer assigning, contribution encouraging). Second, we conduct preliminary quantitative analysis on a large set of review comments that were labeled by TSHC (a two-stage hybrid classification algorithm), which is able to automatically classify review comments by combining rule-based and machine-learning techniques. Through the quantitative study, we explore the typical review patterns. We find that the three projects present similar comments distribution on each subcategory. Pull-requests submitted by inexperienced contributors tend to contain potential issues even though they have passed the tests. Furthermore, external contributors are more likely to break project conventions in their early contributions.     

Podcasting by synchronising PowerPoint and voice: What are the pedagogical benefits?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of audio–visual synchrony in podcasting and its possible pedagogical benefits. ‘Synchrony’ in this study refers to the simultaneous playback of audio and video data streams, so that the transitions between presentation slides occur at “lecturer chosen” points in the audio commentary. Manufacturers of lecture recording software (e.g. ProfCast) would have us believe that the synchrony of image and audio should improve the learning experience. We have yet to see in the literature any empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. In our study, 90 participants in two groups undertook two electronic lectures (e-lectures) on two separate topics, the subject matter of neither was familiar to them beforehand. Each group experienced one “synchronous” presentation (e-lecture) of one of the topics, and one “separate” presentation (i.e. PowerPoint and audio files separately presented) of the other topic. Each group therefore experienced both “synchronous” and “separate” delivery and they were then given an MCQ test that assessed five levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Results show no differences in innate ability between the two groups but the evidence supported our primary hypothesis in that statistically significantly higher test scores were seen when participants viewed a synchronous e-lecture; these scores were accounted for by subjects’ performance at three of the five levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Qualitative ‘attitude’ survey results also displayed participant preference towards the synchronous over the asynchronous mode of delivery, and in spite of general acceptance of the proposed benefits of electronic proceedings, a majority preference towards traditional rather than electronic lectures. Despite this conservatism, this paper explores in more detail the potential benefits of podcasting via synchronous PowerPoint and voice.     

What is the relation between slow feature analysis and independent component analysis?

We present an analytical comparison between linear slow feature analysis and second-order independent component analysis, and show that in the case of one time delay, the two approaches are equivalent. We also consider the case of several time delays and discuss two possible extensions of slow feature analysis.     

What’s the Big Deal About Big Data Loss (Actually Theft)?

I get confused about the way security deals with so-called data loss (actually theft). Recently we had what the media called, in various forms, a crisis, a huge cyberattack against, and so forth against JPMorgan Chase (JP), one of many such instances in the last year. So I looked at the various claims surrounding this instance, and found consistently that the only known “loss” of data was names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. And it was not lost! It was stolen, and JP still has copies. So, to be really clear, this is more or less the same information found in the phone book, available from various mailing list providers for less than a tenth of a penny a piece, and of no significant consequence I can identify. The cost of “protection” for consumers is $90 per person per year, although I do not quite get what this cost covers.     

What are the trend and core knowledge of information security? A citation and co-citation analysis

Information technology brings business success opportunities, but also causes potential safety hazards to organizations. In response to the increasing academia and industry concerns regarding information security (ISec), this study systematically explored extant ISec research and identified eight core knowledge groups, including (1) intrusion detection, (2) privacy protection, (3) secure machine learning, (4) cryptosystem, (5) data service security, (6) malware analysis, (7) security decision-making, and (8) security management. The detection of research hotspots shows that data service security and risk management garner the most current research attention. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive ISec framework to help systematically understand and achieve ISec.     

What if it Switched on the Sun? Exploring Creativity in a Brainstorming Session with Children Through a Vygotskyan Perspective

We contribute in this study a first step in theory-based understanding on how creativity in collaborative design sessions relates to the elements that are present in a creative act. These elements include group composition, objects present, practices used, and previous knowledge of the participants. The context of this study was our search for lightweight methods for technology design with children, which can be used in a school context with large groups, will require as little amount of training as possible, and can be set up quickly. We formed a mixed group, consisting of young children, an older child and an adult, with the aim of involving children in creative collaborative brainstorming during the very early phases of design, so as to come up with fruitful ideas for technology development. We report our process and examine the implications of our results in relation to different elements that trigger and affect creativity in the collaborative design process. Use of Vygotsky’s cycle of creativity as our theoretical lens together with timeline analysis method presented in the paper were essential for seeing beneath the surface of what happened in this complex, collaborative creative process. Our results can be used for further methodological development of creative collaborative sessions, both with children and adults.     

Do Accelerating Turing Machines Compute the Uncomputable?

Accelerating Turing machines have attracted much attention in the last decade or so. They have been described as “the work-horse of hypercomputation” (Potgieter and Rosinger 2010: 853). But do they really compute beyond the “Turing limit”—e.g., compute the halting function? We argue that the answer depends on what you mean by an accelerating Turing machine, on what you mean by computation, and even on what you mean by a Turing machine. We show first that in the current literature the term “accelerating Turing machine” is used to refer to two very different species of accelerating machine, which we call end-stage-in and end-stage-out machines, respectively. We argue that end-stage-in accelerating machines are not Turing machines at all. We then present two differing conceptions of computation, the internal and the external, and introduce the notion of an epistemic embedding of a computation. We argue that no accelerating Turing machine computes the halting function in the internal sense. Finally, we distinguish between two very different conceptions of the Turing machine, the purist conception and the realist conception; and we argue that Turing himself was no subscriber to the purist conception. We conclude that under the realist conception, but not under the purist conception, an accelerating Turing machine is able to compute the halting function in the external sense. We adopt a relatively informal approach throughout, since we take the key issues to be philosophical rather than mathematical.     

Do Rules and Patterns Affect Design Maintainability?

At the present time, best rules and patterns have reached a zenith in popularity and diffiusion, thanks to the software community’s efforts to discover, classify and spread knowledge concerning all types of rules and patterns. Rules and patterns are useful elements, but many features remain to be studied if we wish to apply them in a rational manner. The improvement in quality that rules and patterns can inject into design is a key issue to be analyzed, so a complete body of empirical knowledge dealing with...