Empirical Results in Automatic Software Documentation/ Explanation and a Plan to Increase Its Tractability

Documentation is an important aspect of software, and issues of project personnel turnover, contractual obligations, and so forth all represent significant concerns. Documentation, in essence, provides understanding. We report on the result of an experiment in automatic software documentation/ explanation in which we input a program (written in REFINE™) and output English describing the functionality of the code. Perceptions on the nature of the documentation/explanation task are presented. Significant issues in the design of such systems (e.g., intended audience, source language, abstraction, concept recognition, etc.) are identified. The characterization of this area as nontriviaT leads to a research plan to broaden the source of solutions to related areas: machine translation, decompilation, question answering systems, pattern (image) recognition, knowledge representations developed for automatic programming, empirical analysis of software modification strategies, and other topics. Potential applications of this area of research are projected, among them: software reuse, intelligent debugging assistant, software porting aids, maintenance assistant, software restructuring

Software issues involved in code translation of C to Ada programs

It is often thought that translation of one programming language to another is a simple solution that can be used to extend the software life span or in rehosting software to another environment. The possible problems are examined as are the advantages and disadvantages of direct machine or human code translation versus that of redesign and rewrite of the software. The translation of the expert system language called C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS) which is written in C, to Ada, will be used as a case study of the problems that are encountered

Skills and Profile of the New Role of the Translator as MT Post-editor

This paper explores the skills and profile of the new role of the translator as MT post-editor in view of the rising interest and use of MT in the translation industry. After a brief review of the relevant literature declaring post-editing (PE) as a profession on its own, the paper goes on to identify the different tasks involved in PE processes, following the work of Krings (Krings, 2001). Then, a series of competences are defined and grouped into three main categories: core competences, linguistic skills and instrumental competences. Finally, a description of the controlled translation scenario of MT PE is advanced taking into account the overall scenario of any translation project, including client description, text domain, text description, use of glossaries, MT engine, MT output quality and purpose of the translated text.Aquest article aborda les habilitats i les característiques del perfil del nou rol del traductor com a posteditor de traducció automàtica, tot i tenint en compte l'augment de l'interès en i l'ús de la traducció automàtica per part de la industria de la traducció. Després d'una breu revisió de la literatura més rellevant sobre postedició (PE) en tant que professió per ella mateixa, l'article identifica les diferents tasques implicades en els processos de PE, segons la proposta de Krings (2001). A continuació es defineix una sèrie de competències que s'agrupen en tres categories principals: competències nuclears, habilitats lingüístiques i competències instrumentals. Finalment el artículo proposa una descripció de l'escenari de traducció controlada propi de la PE de traducció automàtica, sense perdre de vista l'escenari general de qualsevol projecte de traducció, que inclou la descripció del client, el domini del text, la descripció del text, l'ús de glossaris, el motor de traducció automàtica, la qualitat de la traducció automàtica resultant i el propòsit del text traduït.Este artículo aborda las habilidades y las características del perfil del nuevo rol del traductor como poseditor de traducción automática, a la luz del aumento del interés en y del uso de la traducción automática por parte de la industria de la traducción. Después de una breve revisión de la literatura más relevante sobre posedición (PE) en tanto que profesión por sí misma, en el artículo se identifican las diferentes tareas implicadas en los procesos de PE, según la propuesta de Krings (2001). A continuación se define una serie de competencias que se agrupan en tres categorías principales: competencias nucleares, habilidades lingüísticas y competencias instrumentales. Finalmente el artículo propone una descripción del escenario de traducción controlada propio de la PE de traducción automática, sin perder de vista el marco general de cualquier proyecto de traducción, que incluye la descripción del cliente, el dominio del texto, la descripción del texto, el uso de glosarios, el motor de traducción automática, la calidad de la traducción automática resultante y el propósito del texto traducido

Towards a user-friendly webservice architecture for statistical machine translation in the PANACEA project

This paper presents a webservice architecture for Statistical Machine Translation aimed at non-technical users. A workflow editor allows a user to combine different webservices using a graphical user interface. In the current state of this project, the webservices have been implemented for a range of sentential and sub-sentential aligners. The advantage of a common interface and a common data format allows the user to build workflows exchanging different aligners

A retrospective view on the promise on machine translation for Bahasa Melayu-English

Research and development activities for machine translation systems from English language to others are more progressive than vice versa. It has been more than 30 years since the machine translation was introduced and yet a Malay language or Bahasa Melayu (BM) to English machine translation engine is not available. Consequently, many translation systems have been developed for the world's top 10 languages in terms of native speakers, but none for BM, although the language is used by more than 200 million speakers around the world. This paper attempts to seek possible reasons as why such situation occurs. A summative overview to show progress, challenges as well as future works on MT is presented. Issues faced by researchers and system developers in modeling and developing a machine translation engine are also discussed. The study of the previous translation systems (from other languages to English) reveals that the accuracy level can be achieved up to 85 %. The figure suggests that the translation system is not reliable if it is to be utilized in a serious translation activity. The most prominent difficulties are the complexity of grammar rules and ambiguity problems of the source language. Thus, we hypothesize that the inclusion of ‘semantic’ property in the translation rules may produce a better quality BM-English MT engine

Neurons and symbols: a manifesto

We discuss the purpose of neural-symbolic integration including its principles, mechanisms and applications. We outline a cognitive computational model for neural-symbolic integration, position the model in the broader context of multi-agent systems, machine learning and automated reasoning, and list some of the challenges for the area of neural-symbolic computation to achieve the promise of effective integration of robust learning and expressive reasoning under uncertainty

Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach

Semantic Web Services have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential, and attract significant attention from both industry and the research community. Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web Service technologies has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many systems have been developed without considering the potential of the web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a very tedious and expensive process, which carries a definite risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies which allow the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such a strategy. In this paper we propose a methodology for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services by taking the advantage of rigorous mathematical methods. Our methodology allows users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platform automatically or semi-automatically

Hybrid rule-based - example-based MT: feeding apertium with sub-sentential translation units

This paper describes a hybrid machine translation (MT) approach that consists of integrating bilingual chunks (sub-sentential translation units) obtained from parallel corpora into an MT system built using the Apertium free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform, which uses a shallow-transfer translation approach. In the integration of bilingual chunks, special care has been taken so as not to break the application of the existing Apertium structural transfer rules, since this would increase the number of ungrammatical translations. The method consists of (i) the application of a dynamic-programming algorithm to compute the best translation coverage of the input sentence given the collection of bilingual chunks available; (ii) the translation of the input sentence as usual by Apertium; and (iii) the application of a language model to choose one of the possible translations for each of the bilingual chunks detected. Results are reported for the translation from English-to-Spanish, and vice versa, when marker-based bilingual chunks automatically obtained from parallel corpora are used