6330846
Component-based software engineering: technologies, development frameworks, and quality assurance schemes
Component-based software development approach is based on the idea to develop software systems by selecting appropriate off-the-shelf components and then to assemble them with a well-defined software architecture. Because the new software development paradigm is very different from the traditional approach, quality assurance (QA) for component-based software development is a new topic in the software engineering community. In this paper, we survey current component-based software technologies, describe their advantages and disadvantages, and discuss the features they inherit. We also address QA issues for component-based software. As a major contribution, we propose a QA model for component-based software which covers component requirement analysis, component development, component certification, component customization, and system architecture design, integration, testing and maintenance.
45209699
A Workflow Model for Chinese Business Processes
This paper proposes a new workflow model (MAWM) targeted at Chinese business processing. The cultural dependent characteristics of Chinese business processes are identified and taken into account in the MAWM model. MAWM adopts a decentralized modeling style based on the conventional business perspective on labor division and cooperation. This idea is reflected in the concept of agent-workflow. Activity-based and communication-based modeling methods are integrated in the process model. They are used to model different types of business activities. In addition, the model is formalized using Process Algebra and a simplified algorithm is proposed for safety verification of workflow processes.
12876616
A Design of Temporal Event Extraction from Chinese Financial News
This paper presents an information system for Chinese Information Extraction from Financial news (CHIEF). The ultimate target of the system is to extract information concerning the occurrence time and places of the financial activities in the different companies from a local Hong Kong newspaper, namely (Tao Kung Pao). To facilitate event extraction purpose, two groups of templates were defined, i.e. the company related and company restructuring templates. They are used to select the desired information for each type of financial activities, such as (bankruptcy) or (merge). Each specific event is then represented using a frame-based knowledge structure. Two types of slots are embedded in each frame: they are the activity- and time-related slots. Based on these slots, multiple activities are interconnected according to their entity relations, temporal relations or the deduced relations. Effectively, CHIEF is a question-answering system designed for handling the company related queries, event based queries, temporal queries and complex queries in a finance domain.
690242
Improving Quality of Email Categorization with Tournament Methods
The tournament text classification methods are proposed in this article to perform the task of email categorization, in which the essence is to break down the multi-class categorization process into a set of binary classification tasks. We implement the methods of elimination and Round Robin tournament to classify emails within 15 folders. Substantial experiments are conducted to compare the effectiveness and robustness of the tournament methods against the n-way classification method and the voting method. The experimental results show that the tournament methods outperform the n-way method by 11.7% and the voting method by 4.1% regarding precision, and the Round Robin performs slightly better than the Elimination tournament on average.
37472111
Extending the superimposed codeword indexing scheme to handle incomplete information
In order to use Prolog as a basis for database applications, techniques are required for rapid retrieval of clauses from large data sets. Various researchers have contributed to the development of indexing strategies for this purpose. One such strategy is known as superimposed codeword+mask bits (SCW+MB). One extension of Prolog which is useful in the development of deductive databases is the ability to handle incomplete information. A form of incomplete information based on sets has been introduced and used in a deductive database system. In order to provide efficient access to clauses containing incomplete information, existing strategies need to be adapted accordingly. This paper presents an extension to the SCW+MB algorithm to cover incomplete information, and describes how this can be realized in hardware.
16840924
Improving Transliteration with Precise Alignment of Phoneme Chunks and Using Contextual Features
Automatic transliteration of foreign names is basically regarded as a diminutive clone of the machine translation (MT) problem. It thus follows IBM's conventional MT models under the source-channel framework. Nonetheless, some parameters of this model dealing with zero-fertility words in the target sequences, can negatively impact transliteration effectiveness because of the inevitable inverted conditional probability estimation. Instead of source-channel, this paper presents a direct probabilistic transliteration model using contextual features of phonemes with a tailored alignment scheme for phoneme chunks. Experiments demonstrate superior performance over the source-channel for the task of English-Chinese transliteration.
1581000
Extracting and representing cross-language dependencies in diverse software systems
This paper presents an approach for dealing with multi-language software systems. Much of the focus of reverse engineering tools is in analyzing software systems written in one programming language. Nowadays, the abundance of new technologies and languages used to ease application development raises new challenges for reverse engineers. Therefore, this paper focuses on finding cross-language dependencies in such diverse, heterogeneous software systems. Our approach uses source navigator extractors to produce the facts inside each language. Then, we show an example for finding Java Native Interface (JNI) dependencies between facts from Java and C/C++ code. The integrated facts are produced in GXL form, and conform to a unified schema introduced in the paper. This approach is useful from several perspectives. It illustrates how to retrieve the dependencies from software systems written in more than one programming language. Also, the generated facts conform to the GXL format, which is accepted by many reverse engineering tools. The usefulness and scalability of the approach are tested in a case study.
16497195
Computable Economic Analysis
This paper discusses an economic equilibrium theory with computabil-ity constraints on both the magnitudes (prices, quantities, etc.) and the operations (to perceive, evaluate, choose, communicate, etc) that agents can use. Prices and quantities are computable numbers (Turing (1936)), and preference relations, utility functions, demand functions are computable (in the sense of Moschovakis (1964)). We present sharper versions of several traditional assertions on utility representation , existence of consumer demand functions, the fundamental welfare theorems, characterizations of market excess demands. We also give a \computable coun-terexample" to the existence of a competitive equilibrium. These results can be interpreted as possibility and impossibility results in computability-bounded ratio-nality, and in computational economics.
14489674
Automatic lyrics alignment for Cantonese popular music
From lyrics-display on electronic music players and Karaoke videos to surtitles for live Chinese opera performance, one feature is common to all these everyday functionalities temporal: synchronization of the written text and its corresponding musical phrase. Our goal is to automate the process of lyrics alignment, a procedure which, to date, is still handled manually in the Cantonese popular song (Cantopop) industry. In our system, a vocal signal enhancement algorithm is developed to extract vocal signals from a CD recording in order to detect the onsets of the syllables sung and to determine the corresponding pitches. The proposed system is specifically designed for Cantonese, in which the contour of the musical melody and the tonal contour of the lyrics must match perfectly. With this prerequisite, we use a dynamic time warping algorithm to align the lyrics. The robustness of this approach is supported by experiment results. The system was evaluated with 70 twenty-second music segments and most samples have their lyrics aligned correctly.
7622452
Tracking based motion segmentation under relaxed statistical assumptions
We present a novel and efficient motion segmentation and tracking algorithm that follows the shift and align paradigm. We introduce two statistical tests to evaluate the similarity of aligned image pixels or patches and we use them to determine the spatial extend of each segment. The one statistical test is fast and accurate when the noise is moderate and the other employs a sophisticated noise model involving the Mahalanobis distance to handle correlated noise. Direct computation of the Mahalanobis distance is prohibitively expensive so we apply the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury identity and amortization to reduce the cost by several orders of magnitude. We tested both versions of the algorithm on a variety of image sequences (indoor and outdoor, real and synthetic, constant and varying lighting, stationary and moving camera, one of them with known ground truth) with very good results.
6619418
The Software Bookshelf
Legacy software systems are typically complex, geriatric, and difficult to change, having evolved over decades and having passed through many developers. Nevertheless, these systems are mature, heavily used, and constitute massive corporate assets. Migrating such systems to modern platforms is a significant challenge due to the loss of information over time. As a result, we embarked on a research project to design and implement an environment to support software migration. In particular, we focused on migrating legacy PL/I source code to C++, with an initial phase of looking at redocumentation strategies. Recent technologies such as reverse engineering tools and World Wide Web standards now make it possible to build tools that greatly simplify the process of redocumenting a legacy software system. In this paper we introduce the concept of a software bookshelf as a means to capture, organize, and manage information about a legacy software system. We distinguish three roles directly involved in the construction, population, and use of such a bookshelf: the builder, the librarian, and the patron. From these perspectives, we describe requirements for the bookshelf, as well as a generic architecture and a prototype implementation. We also discuss various parsing and analysis tools that were developed and integrated to assist in the recovery of useful information about a legacy system. In addition, we illustrate how a software bookshelf is populated with the information of a given software project and how the bookshelf can be used in a program-understanding scenario. Reported results are based on a pilot project that developed a prototype bookshelf for a software system consisting of approximately 300K lines of code written in a PL/I dialect.