Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial 2018)

Peer reviewe

Investigating Machine Learning Methods for Language and Dialect Identification of Cuneiform Texts

Identification of the languages written using cuneiform symbols is a difficult task due to the lack of resources and the problem of tokenization. The Cuneiform Language Identification task in VarDial 2019 addresses the problem of identifying seven languages and dialects written in cuneiform; Sumerian and six dialects of Akkadian language: Old Babylonian, Middle Babylonian Peripheral, Standard Babylonian, Neo-Babylonian, Late Babylonian, and Neo-Assyrian. This paper describes the approaches taken by SharifCL team to this problem in VarDial 2019. The best result belongs to an ensemble of Support Vector Machines and a naive Bayes classifier, both working on character-level features, with macro-averaged F1-score of 72.10%

Linear and Affine Typing of Continuation-Passing Style

Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Queen Mary, University of Londo

Programming Languages and Systems

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 28th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2019, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2019, held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019

Inferring unobserved co-occurrence events in Anchored Packed Trees

Anchored Packed Trees (APTs) are a novel approach to distributional semantics that takes distributional composition to be a process of lexeme contextualisation. A lexeme’s meaning, characterised as knowledge concerning co-occurrences involving that lexeme, is represented with a higher-order dependency-typed structure (the APT) where paths associated with higher-order dependencies connect vertices associated with weighted lexeme multisets. The central innovation in the compositional theory is that the APT’s type structure enables the precise alignment of the semantic representation of each of the lexemes being composed. Like other count-based distributional spaces, however, Anchored Packed Trees are prone to considerable data sparsity, caused by not observing all plausible co-occurrences in the given data. This problem is amplified for models like APTs, that take the grammatical type of a co-occurrence into account. This results in a very sparse distributional space, requiring a mechanism for inferring missing knowledge. Most methods face this challenge in ways that render the resulting word representations uninterpretable, with the consequence that distributional composition becomes difficult to model and reason about. In this thesis, I will present a practical evaluation of the Apt theory, including a large-scale hyperparameter sensitivity study and a characterisation of the distributional space that APTs give rise to. Based on the empirical analysis, the impact of the problem of data sparsity is investigated. In order to address the data sparsity challenge and retain the interpretability of the model, I explore an alternative algorithm — distributional inference — for improving elementary representations. The algorithm involves explicitly inferring unobserved co-occurrence events by leveraging the distributional neighbourhood of the semantic space. I then leverage the rich type structure in APTs and propose a generalisation of the distributional inference algorithm. I empirically show that distributional inference improves elementary word representations and is especially beneficial when combined with an intersective composition function, which is due to the complementary nature of inference and composition. Lastly, I qualitatively analyse the proposed algorithms in order to characterise the knowledge that they are able to infer, as well as their impact on the distributional APT space

Programmiersprachen und Rechenkonzepte

Seit 1984 veranstaltet die GI-Fachgruppe "Programmiersprachen und Rechenkonzepte" regelmäßig im Frühjahr einen Workshop im Physikzentrum Bad Honnef. Das Treffen dient in erster Linie dem gegenseitigen Kennenlernen, dem Erfahrungsaustausch, der Diskussion und der Vertiefung gegenseitiger Kontakte. In diesem Forum werden Vorträge und Demonstrationen sowohl bereits abgeschlossener als auch noch laufender Arbeiten vorgestellt, unter anderem (aber nicht ausschließlich) zu Themen wie - Sprachen, Sprachparadigmen, - Korrektheit von Entwurf und Implementierung, -Werkzeuge, -Software-/Hardware-Architekturen, -Spezifikation, Entwurf, - Validierung, Verifikation, - Implementierung, Integration, - Sicherheit (Safety und Security), - eingebettete Systeme, - hardware-nahe Programmierung. In diesem Technischen Bericht sind einige der präsentierten Arbeiten zusammen gestellt

Design and implementation of a programmable middleware

This thesis presents a languagebased, safely programmable middleware for the simple, highlevel, and expressive construction of composable open systems. The middleware provides services for pickling, components, and distribution. All are based on a minimal set of primitives and syntax extensions, such that they otherwise can be completely implemented and customized in a highlevel language with automatic memory management, exception handling, higherorder functions, futures, and dynamic types. Using this approach, it becomes possible to describe the complete architecture of the middleware system, and to leverage the language\u27;s safety features in the middleware itself.Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt eine Programmiersprachenbasierte programmierbare Middleware, die eine einfache Konstruktion offener Systeme auf hoher Ebene ermöglicht. Die Middleware bietet Dienste für Pickling, Komponenten und Verteilung an, die allesamt auf einem minimalen Satz an Primitiven und Syntaxerweiterungen beruhen. Der Hauptteil der Dienste kann so in einer höheren Programmiersprache mit automatischer Speicherverwaltung, Ausnahmebehandlung, Prozeduren höherer Ordnung, Futures und dynamischen Typen realisiert werden. Dies ermöglicht es, die Architektur der Middleware vollständig zu beschreiben, sowie die Sicherheitsgarantien der höheren Programmiersprache in der Implementierung der Middleware selbst zu nutzen

Adaptive object management for distributed systems

This thesis describes an architecture supporting the management of pluggable software components and evaluates it against the requirement for an enterprise integration platform for the manufacturing and petrochemical industries. In a distributed environment, we need mechanisms to manage objects and their interactions. At the least, we must be able to create objects in different processes on different nodes; we must be able to link them together so that they can pass messages to each other across the network; and we must deliver their messages in a timely and reliable manner. Object based environments which support these services already exist, for example ANSAware(ANSA, 1989), DEC's Objectbroker(ACA,1992), Iona's Orbix(Orbix,1994)Yet such environments provide limited support for composing applications from pluggable components. Pluggability is the ability to install and configure a component into an environment dynamically when the component is used, without specifying static dependencies between components when they are produced. Pluggability is supported to a degree by dynamic binding. Components may be programmed to import references to other components and to explore their interfaces at runtime, without using static type dependencies. Yet thus overloads the component with the responsibility to explore bindings. What is still generally missing is an efficient general-purpose binding model for managing bindings between independently produced components. In addition, existing environments provide no clear strategy for dealing with fine grained objects. The overhead of runtime binding and remote messaging will severely reduce performance where there are a lot of objects with complex patterns of interaction. We need an adaptive approach to managing configurations of pluggable components according to the needs and constraints of the environment. Management is made difficult by embedding bindings in component implementations and by relying on strong typing as the only means of verifying and validating bindings. To solve these problems we have built a set of configuration tools on top of an existing distributed support environment. Specification tools facilitate the construction of independent pluggable components. Visual composition tools facilitate the configuration of components into applications and the verification of composite behaviours. A configuration model is constructed which maintains the environmental state. Adaptive management is made possible by changing the management policy according to this state. Such policy changes affect the location of objects, their bindings, and the choice of messaging system

The Siren Site and the Long Transition from Archaic to Late Prehistoric Lifeways on the Eastern Edwards Plateau of Central Texas

On behalf of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), SWCA Environmental Consultants (SWCA) conducted testing and data recovery investigations at the Siren site (41WM1126), a prehistoric multi-component site in the Interstate Highway 35 right-of-way along the South Fork of the San Gabriel River in Williamson County, Texas. The work was done to fulfill TxDOT’s compliance obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act and the Antiquities Code of Texas. The testing investigations were conducted under Antiquities Permit 3834, and the subsequent data recovery was under Permit 3938. Kevin Miller served as Principal Investigator on both permits. Though the site extends far beyond the area of potential effects both horizontally and vertically, the investigations focused on Late Archaic and Late Prehistoric components within a relatively limited area that would be subject to project impacts. The investigations were conducted in February 2006. The investigations identified five isolable components that were intermittently laid down from approximately 2600 to 900 years ago. A substantial Late Prehistoric Austin phase occupation is represented by Scallorn projectile points, stone tools, burned rock, faunal materials, and radiocarbon dates from cooking features. The component feature assemblage includes a cluster of discrete, well-preserved burned rock features that range from small fire-cracked rock concentrations to a large, slab-lined feature that dominates the cluster. The underlying components include four cultural strata representing a series of phases in the final millennium or so of the long Archaic period. These components span approximately 2600 to 1500 b.p., though earlier, deeply buried components were also noted on the site. These deeper deposits were not the focus of the investigations, however, since they would not be affected by the project. The Archaic components revealed a suite of small side-notched dart points such as Ensor, Fairland, and Frio, as well as many earlier broad-bladed styles such as Castroville, Montell, Marshall, and Pedernales. These robust components contained numerous burned rock features of varying size and function, abundant tools, well-preserved faunal materials, macrobotanical remains including geophytes from several earth ovens, and a large suite of radiocarbon dates. The features include an incipient burned rock midden, burned rock clusters, a debitage reduction area, a biface cache, slab-lined hearths, basin-shaped hearths, and small circular hearths. The distributions of artifacts and features within the Archaic components across the excavation blocks showed significant variations. These differences reflect sequential components that provide a view of diachronic trends in technology, subsistence, economy, and a suite of other behaviors and activities during the long transition from Archaic to Late Prehistoric adaptations. As previously determined by the testing excavations and further substantiated by the data recovery investigations, the Siren site, most notably the Late Archaic and Late Prehistoric components, is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion D, 36 CFR 60.4, and eligible for State Archeological Landmark designation under Criteria 1 and 2 of the Rules of Practice and Procedure for the Antiquities Code of Texas, 13 TAC 26.8. The excavations and subsequent analysis have mitigated the adverse effects of the bridge construction by recovering the vast majority of the affected components within the area of potential effect. No further archaeological work is recommended. Portions of the site outside the area of potential effects have not been fully evaluated, and any future impacts beyond the mitigated areas warrant further assessment