6 research outputs found

    Short message service normalization for communication with a health information system

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    Philosophiae Doctor - PhDShort Message Service (SMS) is one of the most popularly used services for communication between mobile phone users. In recent times it has also been proposed as a means for information access. However, there are several challenges to be overcome in order to process an SMS, especially when it is used as a query in an information retrieval system.SMS users often tend deliberately to use compacted and grammatically incorrect writing that makes the message difficult to process with conventional information retrieval systems. To overcome this, a pre-processing step known as normalization is required. In this thesis an investigation of SMS normalization algorithms is carried out. To this end,studies have been conducted into the design of algorithms for translating and normalizing SMS text. Character-based, unsupervised and rule-based techniques are presented. An investigation was also undertaken into the design and development of a system for information access via SMS. A specific system was designed to access information related to a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database in healthcare, using a case study. This study secures SMS communication, especially for healthcare information systems. The proposed technique is to encipher the messages using the secure shell (SSH) protocol

    Understanding and Tooling Framework API Evolution

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    RÉSUMÉ Les cadres d’applications sont intensivement utilisés dans le développement de logiciels modernes et sont accessibles au travers de leur Application Programming Interface (API), qui définit un ensemble de fonctionnalités que les programmes clients peuvent utiliser pour accomplir des tâches. Les cadres d’applications ne cessent d’évoluer au cours de leurs vies pour satisfaire la demande de nouvelles fonctions ou pour rapiécer des vulnérabilités de sécurité. L’évolution des cadres d’applications peut engendrer des modifications de l’API auxquelles les programmes clients doivent s’adapter. Les mises à jour vers les nouvelles versions des cadres d’applications prennent du temps et peuvent même interrompre le service. Aider les développeurs à mettre à jour leurs programmes est d’un grand intérêt pour les chercheurs académiques et industriels. Dans cette thèse, nous réalisons une étude exploratoire de la réalité des évolutions des API et de leurs usages dans le dépôt central de Maven et dans deux grands cadres d’applications avec de larges écosystèmes : Apache et Eclipse. Nous découvrons que les API changent dans environ 10 % des cadres d’applications et touchent 50 % des programmes clients. Il arrive plus souvent que des classes et des méthodes manquent et disparaissent dans les cadres d’applications. Ces classes et méthodes affectent les programmes clients plus souvent que les autres changements des API. Nous montrons aussi qu’environ 80 % des utilisations des API dans les programmes clients peuvent être réduits par refactoring. Forts de ce constat, nous faisons une expérience pour vérifier l’effectivité des règles de changement des API générés par les approches existantes, qui recommandent les remplacements pour les API disparues pendant l’évolution des cadres d’application. Nous confirmons que les règles de changement des API aident les développeurs à trouver des remplacements aux API manquantes plus précisément, en particulier pour des cadres d’applications difficiles à comprendre. Enfin, nous étudions l’efficacité des caractéristiques utilisées pour construire les règles de changement des API et différentes manières de combiner plusieurs caractéristiques. Nous soutenons et montrons que des approches basées sur l’optimisation multi-objective peuvent détecter des règles de changement des API plus précisément et qu’elles peuvent prendre en compte plus facilement de nouvelles caractéristiques que les approches précédentes.----------ABSTRACT Frameworks are widely used in modern software development and are accessed through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which specify sets of functionalities that client programs can use to accomplish their tasks. Frameworks keep evolving during their lifespan to cope with new requirements, to patch security vulnerabilities, etc. Framework evolution may lead to API changes to which client programs must adapt. Upgrading to new releases of frameworks is time-consuming and can even interrupt services. Helping developers upgrade frameworks draws great interests from both academic and industrial researchers. In this dissertation, we first present an exploratory study to investigate the reality of API changes and usages in Maven repository and two framework ecosystems: Apache and Eclipse. We find that API changes in about 10% of frameworks affect about 50% of client programs. Missing classes and missing methods happen more often in frameworks and affect client programs more often than other API changes. About 80% API usages in client programs can be reduced by refactoring. Based on these findings, we conduct an empirical study to verify the usefulness of API change rules automatically built by previous approaches, which recommend the replacements for missing APIs due to framework evolution. We show that API change rules do help developers find the replacements of missing APIs more accurately, especially for frameworks difficult to understand. We describe another empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of features used to build API change rules and of different ways combining multiple features. We argue and show that multi-objective-optimization-based approaches can detect more correct change rules and are easier to extend with new features than previous approaches

    Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning

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    These are the proceedings of the 11th Nonmonotonic Reasoning Workshop. The aim of this series is to bring together active researchers in the broad area of nonmonotonic reasoning, including belief revision, reasoning about actions, planning, logic programming, argumentation, causality, probabilistic and possibilistic approaches to KR, and other related topics. As part of the program of the 11th workshop, we have assessed the status of the field and discussed issues such as: Significant recent achievements in the theory and automation of NMR; Critical short and long term goals for NMR; Emerging new research directions in NMR; Practical applications of NMR; Significance of NMR to knowledge representation and AI in general
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