Syntax highlighting as an influencing factor when reading and comprehending source code

Syntax highlighting or syntax colouring, plays a vital role in programming development environments by colour-coding various code elements differently. The supposition is that this syntax highlighting assists programmers when reading and analysing code. However, academic text books are largely only available in black-and-white which could influence the comprehension of novice and beginner programmers. This study investigated whether student programmers experience more difficulty in reading and comprehending source code when it is presented without syntax highlighting. Number of fixations, fixation durations and regressions were all higher for black-and-white code than for colour code but not significantly so. Subjectively students indicated that the colour code snippets were easier to read and more aesthetically pleasing. Based on the analysis it could be concluded that students do not experience significantly more difficulty when reading code in black-and-white as printed in text books

How to Ask for Technical Help? Evidence-based Guidelines for Writing Questions on Stack Overflow

Context: The success of Stack Overflow and other community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) sites depends mainly on the will of their members to answer others' questions. In fact, when formulating requests on Q&A sites, we are not simply seeking for information. Instead, we are also asking for other people's help and feedback. Understanding the dynamics of the participation in Q&A communities is essential to improve the value of crowdsourced knowledge. Objective: In this paper, we investigate how information seekers can increase the chance of eliciting a successful answer to their questions on Stack Overflow by focusing on the following actionable factors: affect, presentation quality, and time. Method: We develop a conceptual framework of factors potentially influencing the success of questions in Stack Overflow. We quantitatively analyze a set of over 87K questions from the official Stack Overflow dump to assess the impact of actionable factors on the success of technical requests. The information seeker reputation is included as a control factor. Furthermore, to understand the role played by affective states in the success of questions, we qualitatively analyze questions containing positive and negative emotions. Finally, a survey is conducted to understand how Stack Overflow users perceive the guideline suggestions for writing questions. Results: We found that regardless of user reputation, successful questions are short, contain code snippets, and do not abuse with uppercase characters. As regards affect, successful questions adopt a neutral emotional style. Conclusion: We provide evidence-based guidelines for writing effective questions on Stack Overflow that software engineers can follow to increase the chance of getting technical help. As for the role of affect, we empirically confirmed community guidelines that suggest avoiding rudeness in question writing.Comment: Preprint, to appear in Information and Software Technolog

A Topic Recommender for Journalists

The way in which people acquire information on events and form their own opinion on them has changed dramatically with the advent of social media. For many readers, the news gathered from online sources become an opportunity to share points of view and information within micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, mainly aimed at satisfying their communication needs. Furthermore, the need to deepen the aspects related to news stimulates a demand for additional information which is often met through online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. This behaviour has also influenced the way in which journalists write their articles, requiring a careful assessment of what actually interests the readers. The goal of this paper is to present a recommender system, What to Write and Why, capable of suggesting to a journalist, for a given event, the aspects still uncovered in news articles on which the readers focus their interest. The basic idea is to characterize an event according to the echo it receives in online news sources and associate it with the corresponding readers’ communicative and informative patterns, detected through the analysis of Twitter and Wikipedia, respectively. Our methodology temporally aligns the results of this analysis and recommends the concepts that emerge as topics of interest from Twitter and Wikipedia, either not covered or poorly covered in the published news articles

HOW CAN PRODUCT TEXT SNIPPETS BENEFIT FROM ONLINE CUSTOMER REVIEWS?

Product text snippets should highlight the product features that are appealing to customers. Nevertheless, the features in current product snippets mainly are often decided based on the understanding of vendors or advertisers, and may fail to contain the features appealing to customers. This paper investigates how product text snippets generation can benefit from online customer reviews. In doing so, an automated method is designed, in which features and the opinions are extracted from online reviews, and are further used for product text snippet generation. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct two experiments and the results show that the extracted features and the snippet are effective in inviting potential customers, compared with the baseline ones. Experimental results demonstrate that 1) the extracted features are more appealing to customers; and 2) the snippets generated based on the extracted features are more likely to be clicked

Telescope Bibliographies: an Essential Component of Archival Data Management and Operations

Assessing the impact of astronomical facilities rests upon an evaluation of the scientific discoveries which their data have enabled. Telescope bibliographies, which link data products with the literature, provide a way to use bibliometrics as an impact measure for the underlying data. In this paper we argue that the creation and maintenance of telescope bibliographies should be considered an integral part of an observatory's operations. We review the existing tools, services, and workflows which support these curation activities, giving an estimate of the effort and expertise required to maintain an archive-based telescope bibliography.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, to appear in SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, SPIE Conference Series 844

Agent-Supported Mission Operations Teamwork

This slide presentation reviews the development of software agents to support of mission operations teamwork. The goals of the work was to make automation by agents easy to use, supervise and direct, manage information and communication to decrease distraction, interruptions, workload and errors, reduce mission impact of off-nominal situations and increase morale and decrease turnover. The accomplishments or the project are: 1. Collaborative agents - mixed initiative and creation of instructions for mediating agent 2. Methods for prototyping, evaluating and evolving socio-technical systems 3. Technology infusion: teamwork tools in mISSIons 4. Demonstrations in simulation testbed An example of the use of agent is given, the use of an agent to monitor a N2 tank leak. An incomplete instruction to the agent is handled with mediating assistants, or Intelligent Briefing and Response Assistant (IBRA). The IBRA Engine also watches data stream for triggers and executes Act-Whenever actions. There is also a Briefing and Response Instruction (BRI) which is easy for a discipline specialist to create through a BRI editor

Highlighting model elements to improve OCL comprehension

Models, metamodels, and model transformations play a central role in Model-Driven Development (MDD). Object Constraint Language (OCL) was initially proposed as part of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard to add the precision and validation capabilities lacking in its diagrams, and to express well-formedness rules in its metamodel. OCL has several other applications, such as defining design metrics, code-generation templates, or validation rules for model transformations, required in MDD. Learning OCL as part of a UML course at the university would seem natural but is still the exception rather than the rule. We believe that this is mainly due to a widespread perception that OCL is hard to learn, as gleaned from claims made in the literature. Based on data gathered over the past school years from numerous undergraduate students of di↵erent Software Engineering courses, we analyzed how learning design by contract clauses with UML+OCL compares with several other Software Engineering Body Of Knowledge (SWEBOK) topics. The outcome of the learning process was collected in a rigorous setup, supported by an e-learning platform. We performed inferential statistics on that data to support our conclusions and identify the relevant explanatory variables for students’ success/failure. The obtained findings lead us to extend an existing OCL tool with two novel features: one is aimed at OCL apprentices and goes straight to the heart of the matter by allowing to visualize how OCL expressions traverse UML class diagrams; the other is intended for researchers and allows to compute OCL complexity metrics, making it possible to replicate a research study like the one we are presenting.Modelos, metamodelos e transformações de modelo desempenham um papel central em MDD. OCL foi inicialmente proposta como parte da UML para adicionar os recursos de precisão e validação que faltavam nestes diagramas, e também para expressar regras de boa formação no metamodelo. OCL possui outras aplicações, tais como definir métricas de desenho, modelos de geração de código ou regras de validação para transformações de modelo, exigidas em MDD. Aprender OCL como parte de um curso de UML na universidade parecia portanto natural, não sendo no entanto o que se verifica. Acreditamos que isso se deva a uma percepção generalizada de que OCL é difícil de aprender, tendo em conta afirmações feitas na literatura. Com base em dados recolhidos em anos letivos anteriores de vários alunos de licenciatura de diferentes cursos de Engenharia de Software, analisámos como a aprendizagem por cláusulas contratuais de UML + OCL se compara a outros tópicos do SWEBOK. O resultado do processo de aprendizagem foi recolhido de forma rigorosa, apoiado por uma plataforma de e-learning. Realizámos estatísticas inferenciais sobre os dados para apoiar as nossas conclusões, de forma a identificar as variáveis explicativas relevantes para o sucesso / fracasso dos alunos. As conclusões obtidas levaram-nos a estender uma ferramenta OCL com duas novas funcionalidades: a primeira é voltada para os estudantes de OCL e permite visualizar como as expressões percorrem um diagrama de classes UML; a segunda é voltada para investigadores e permite calcular métricas de complexidade OCL, habilitando a réplica de um estudo semelhante ao apresentado

Multilingual Word Sense Induction to Improve Web Search Result Clustering

In [12] a novel approach to Web search result clustering based on Word Sense Induction, i.e. the automatic discovery of word senses from raw text was presented; key to the proposed approach is the idea of, first, automatically in- ducing senses for the target query and, second, clustering the search results based on their semantic similarity to the word senses induced. In [1] we proposed an innovative Word Sense Induction method based on multilingual data; key to our approach was the idea that a multilingual context representation, where the context of the words is expanded by considering its translations in different languages, may im- prove the WSI results; the experiments showed a clear per- formance gain. In this paper we give some preliminary ideas to exploit our multilingual Word Sense Induction method to Web search result clustering