Rapport : a fact-based question answering system for portuguese

Question answering is one of the longest-standing problems in natural language processing. Although natural language interfaces for computer systems can be considered more common these days, the same still does not happen regarding access to specific textual information. Any full text search engine can easily retrieve documents containing user specified or closely related terms, however it is typically unable to answer user questions with small passages or short answers. The problem with question answering is that text is hard to process, due to its syntactic structure and, to a higher degree, to its semantic contents. At the sentence level, although the syntactic aspects of natural language have well known rules, the size and complexity of a sentence may make it difficult to analyze its structure. Furthermore, semantic aspects are still arduous to address, with text ambiguity being one of the hardest tasks to handle. There is also the need to correctly process the question in order to define its target, and then select and process the answers found in a text. Additionally, the selected text that may yield the answer to a given question must be further processed in order to present just a passage instead of the full text. These issues take also longer to address in languages other than English, as is the case of Portuguese, that have a lot less people working on them. This work focuses on question answering for Portuguese. In other words, our field of interest is in the presentation of short answers, passages, and possibly full sentences, but not whole documents, to questions formulated using natural language. For that purpose, we have developed a system, RAPPORT, built upon the use of open information extraction techniques for extracting triples, so called facts, characterizing information on text files, and then storing and using them for answering user queries done in natural language. These facts, in the form of subject, predicate and object, alongside other metadata, constitute the basis of the answers presented by the system. Facts work both by storing short and direct information found in a text, typically entity related information, and by containing in themselves the answers to the questions already in the form of small passages. As for the results, although there is margin for improvement, they are a tangible proof of the adequacy of our approach and its different modules for storing information and retrieving answers in question answering systems. In the process, in addition to contributing with a new approach to question answering for Portuguese, and validating the application of open information extraction to question answering, we have developed a set of tools that has been used in other natural language processing related works, such as is the case of a lemmatizer, LEMPORT, which was built from scratch, and has a high accuracy. Many of these tools result from the improvement of those found in the Apache OpenNLP toolkit, by pre-processing their input, post-processing their output, or both, and by training models for use in those tools or other, such as MaltParser. Other tools include the creation of interfaces for other resources containing, for example, synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, or the creation of lists of, for instance, relations between verbs and agents, using rules

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

Contributions of Computational Cognitive Modeling to the Understanding of the Financial Markets

Tese de doutoramento em Ciências e Tecnologias da Informação, apresentada ao Departamento de Engenharia Informática da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de CoimbraOs mercados financeiros são sistemas socioeconómicos complexos, dinâmicos e estratégicos nos quais um grande número de heterogéneos participantes interagem por meio da compra e venda de diferentes tipos de ativos. Os mercados financeiros tais como os mercados de ações (e.g., S&P500) possuem múltiplas funções. Por exemplo, os mercados financeiros propiciam meios para que os participantes e as companhias façam um melhor processo de alocação de capital. Para além disso, o comportamento dos mercados financeiros são geralmente considerados como importantes medidas/sinais para a compreensão do estado atual e futuro das companhias e, em última análise, de todo o sistema económico e financeiro. Entretanto, a importância dos mercados financeiros poderá ser melhor compreendida quando os mercados não cumprem suas funções primordias, mais especificamente e de forma dramática quando ocorre um crash nos mercados financeiros. Em Setembro de 2008, por exemplo, uma série de eventos ameaçou a estabilidade do sistema financeiro mundial. Gigantescas empresas dos mercados financeiros inesperadamente falharam e tiveram de ser resgatadas pelos seus respectivos governos, enquanto que outras simplesmente entraram com pedido de falência. O sistema financeiro mundial esteve próximo do colapso. Embora o desastre tenha, de certa forma, sido evitado, o Crash de 2008 teve consequências imediatas, profundas, e duradouras para a economia mundial. A verdadeira compreensão dos mercados financeiros é de fato difícil. Diferentes hipóteses têm sido propostas para explicar o comportamento dos participantes dos mercados financeiros de forma individual bem como o comportamento dos mercados de forma global. Por um lado, teorias económicas tradicionais como, por exemplo, a Hipótese do Mercado Eficiente, tendem a considerar que os participantes dos mercados financeiros são racionais e que os mercados são eficientes. Entretanto, pesquisas na área de economia comportamental têm fornecido extensa e vasta evidência que demonstra que os participantes dos mercados financeiros possuem desvios comportamentais do chamado comportamento racional. Para além das evidências da economia comportamental, disciplinas tais como a neurociência cognitiva e a neuroeconomia têm clarificado a função das emoções (e.g., felicidade, tristeza, surpresa) no processo de raciocínio e tomada de decisão, aprendizado, bem como a importância das emoções no âmbito da memória humana, particularmente para os processos de codificação e recuperação de memórias. Por outro lado, teorias recentes como a Hipótese do Mercado Adaptativo tentam reconciliar a ideia de mercados eficientes com a economia comportamental, ao reconhecer a importância das emoções, a existência de desvios comportamentais, e a ocorrência de fenómenos e anomalias como as bolhas. O Crash de 2008 conjuntamente com novas evidências fornecidas por diferentes áreas têm salientado a necessidade de novas e interdisciplinares abordagens para o estudo de sistemas e problemas económicos e financeiros. Uma destas abordagens é o uso de Agent-based Financial Markets. Esta abordagem permite aos investigadores se distanciarem das tradicionais crenças a fim de testar novas hipóteses, conceitos, ideias, etc, tornando possível o projeto e realização de experimentos mais realistas e mais plausíveis em termos comportamentais. Esta tese está em linha com este contexto. Neste trabalho exploratório, nosso objetivo é investigar quais contribuições a aplicação de uma abordagem de modelação cognitiva pode trazer para a compreensão dos mercados financeiros, especificamente para o comportamento dos participantes dos mercados financeiros (individualmente) e dos mercados financeiros (globalmente). O ponto de partida é a criação de agentes artificiais com mecanismos similares aos ou inspirados nos usados pelos seres humanos de modo que seja possível conceber agentes artificiais cognitivos, i.e., agentes artificiais com diferentes sistemas de memórias e processos, com a capacidade de reconhecer, simular, e expressar emoções, diferentes processos de tomada de decisão, com a habilidade de receber e processar diferentes tipos de informação, e com a habilidade de aprender. Para este fim, nós primeiro concebemos um modelo cognitivo genérico individual dos participantes dos mercados financeiros (agentes humanos) intitulado TribeCA (Trading and investing with behavioral-emotional Cognitive Agents). O modelo cognitivo proposto é baseado na Belief-Desire Theory of Emotions (BDTE), no modelo cognitive-psychoevolutionary de surpresa proposto por Myer e colegas, e no modelo de surpresa artificial proposto por Macedo e Cardoso. De seguida nós fornecemos uma implementação do modelo proposto a qual foi posteriormente integrada a duas ferramentas utilizadas no contexto dos agent-based financial markets. A plataforma resultante permite o projeto e realização de uma variedade de experimentos económicos e financeiros com agentes artificiais cognitivos. Nós realizamos neste trabalho três experimentos com agentes e multi-agentes a fim de endereçar alguns aspectos fundamentais dos mercados financeiros tais como eficiência e racionalidade. Adicionalmente, nós realizamos dois estudos de casos a fim de comparar a perspectiva tradicional (económica e financeira) com a perspectiva da ciência cognitiva na modelação e computação da surpresa na economia e finança. Esta tese fornece contribuições para o avanço no projeto e realização de abordagens interdisciplinares para o estudo de sistemas ou problemas económicos e financeiros. Nosso modelo cognitivo genérico e sua implementação podem ser utilizados a fim de que sejam explorados outros aspectos dos mercados financeiros, para além dos que foram endereçados nest trabalho, e em outros modelos baseados em agentes. Nós consideramos que este trabalho abre um novo conjunto de possibilidades para investigações quer na academia quer na indústria. Ao final, nós poderemos obter uma melhor compreensão e entendimento sobre o comportamento dos participantes dos mercados financeiros (individualmente) bem como dos mercados financeiros (globalmente). Estas investigações poderão resultar, por exemplo, no desenvolvimento de novos (potencialmente melhores e altamente lucrativos) serviços financeiros para suportar o processo de tomada de decisão dos participantes dos mercados financeiros baseados nas suas emoções, comportamentos, etc...........................................................The financial markets are complex, dynamic, and strategic socio-economic systems in which a great number of heterogeneous market participants interact by essentially buying and selling assets of di ff erent types. The financial markets such as stock markets (e.g., S&P500) serve many functions. For instance, the financial markets help market participants and companies in improving the capital allocation process. Additionally, the behavior of the financial markets is assumed to be an important gauge for helping the understanding of the current and future state of companies and, ultimately, of the whole economic and financial system. However, the importance of the financial markets might be better noticed when they do not fulfill their primary functions, specifically and most dramatically when the financial markets crash. On September 2008, for example, a series of events threated the stability of the world’s financial system. Some gigantic financial services companies had unexpectedly failed and had to be rescued by governments while others simply filled for bankruptcy. The world’s financial system came close to a meltdown. Although disaster had somehow been averted due to a series of actions, the Crash of 2008 had immediate, profound, vast and long-lasting consequences for the world economy. The true understanding of the financial markets are indeed quite di ffi cult. Several hy- potheses have been proposed to try to explain the behavior of the market participants individually as well as the behavior of markets as a whole. On the one hand, tradi- tional economic theories such as the E ffi cient Market Hypothesis tend to assume that market participants are rational as well as that markets are e ffi cient. However, beha- vioral economics research has been providing extensive and vast evidence that market participants have what is known as behavioral biases, i.e., deviations from the so-called rational behavior. In addition to the behavioral economics evidence, disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience and neuroeconomics have been clarifying the role of emotions (e.g., happiness, unhappiness, surprise) for the human reasoning, memory system and processes, and decision-making process. For instance, emotions play a very important role in the memory processes of encoding and retrieving as well as are the basis of a sort of learning system. On the other hand, recent theories such as the Adaptive Market Hypothesis tries to reconciliate market e ffi ciency with behavioral economics by acknowledging the importance of emotions, the existence of behavioral biases, and the occurrence of interesting phenomena and anomalies such as bubbles. The Crash of 2008 together with new evidence provided by di ff erent research areas have been stressing the need for novel and interdisciplinary approaches for the study of economic and financial systems and problems. One of these approaches is the use of Agent-based Financial Markets. Agent-based Financial Markets allows researchers to depart from classical assumptions in order to test di ff erent hypotheses, concepts, ideas, etc, making it possible the design and realization of more realistic and behavioral plausible experiments. This thesis is in line with this context. In this exploratory work we aim to investigate which contributions the application of a cognitive modeling approach might bring to the understanding of the financial markets, specifically to the behavior of both market participants (individually) and the financial markets (globally). The starting point is to empower artificial agents with mechanisms similar to or inspired in those used by humans so that we have artificial cognitive agents, i.e., artificial agents with di ff erent memory systems and processes, the capacity of recognizing, simulating and expressing emotions, decision-making processes, the ability to receive and process di ff erent kinds of information, and the ability to learn. To this end, we first conceive a generic novel cognitive model of individual market participants (human agents) named TribeCA (Trading and investing with behavioral- emotional Cognitive Agents). TribeCA is based on the Belief-Desire Theory of Emo- tions (BDTE), on the cognitive-psychoevolutionary model of surprise proposed by Meyer and colleagues, and on the artificial surprise model proposed by Macedo and Cardoso. Then we provide an implementation of the proposed model which is later integrated into two tools used in the context of agent-based financial markets. The re- sulting platform allows the design and realization of a variety of economic and financial experiments with artificial cognitive agents. We carried out three agent and multi- agent based experiments to address some fundamental aspects regarding the financial markets such as e ffi ciency and rationality. Additionally, we carried out two case studies on comparing the traditional (economics and finance) perspective with the cognitive science perspective on modeling and computing surprise in economics and finance. This thesis provides contributions to the advance in the design and realization of in- terdisciplinary approaches to the study of economic and financial systems or problems. Our generic conceptual cognitive model and implementation might be used both to explore other aspects of the financial markets in addition to those addressed in this work and to other agent-based models. We consider this work opens up a set of novel possibilities for investigations in the academia and in the industry. In the end, we may have a better understanding of the behavior of market participants individually as well as of the financial markets globally. It has the potential to result in, for instance, the development of novel (potentially better and highly lucrative) financial services to support the market participants’ decision-making process based on his/her emotions, behavior, etc.FEDER - project TribeCA (Trading and investing with behavioralemotional Cognitive Agents

Creación de datos multilingües para diversos enfoques basados en corpus en el ámbito de la traducción y la interpretación

Accordingly, this research work aims at exploiting and developing new technologies and methods to better ascertain not only translators’ and interpreters’ needs, but also professionals’ and ordinary people’s on their daily tasks, such as corpora and terminology compilation and management. The main topics covered by this work relate to Computational Linguistics (CL), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Translation (MT), Comparable Corpora, Distributional Similarity Measures (DSM), Terminology Extraction Tools (TET) and Terminology Management Tools (TMT). In particular, this work examines three main questions: 1) Is it possible to create a simpler and user-friendly comparable corpora compilation tool? 2) How to identify the most suitable TMT and TET for a given translation or interpreting task? 3) How to automatically assess and measure the internal degree of relatedness in comparable corpora? This work is composed of thirteen peer-reviewed scientific publications, which are included in Appendix A, while the methodology used and the results obtained in these studies are summarised in the main body of this document. Fecha de lectura de Tesis Doctoral: 22 de noviembre 2019Corpora are playing an increasingly important role in our multilingual society. High-quality parallel corpora are a preferred resource in the language engineering and the linguistics communities. Nevertheless, the lack of sufficient and up-to-date parallel corpora, especially for narrow domains and poorly-resourced languages is currently one of the major obstacles to further advancement across various areas like translation, language learning and, automatic and assisted translation. An alternative is the use of comparable corpora, which are easier and faster to compile. Corpora, in general, are extremely important for tasks like translation, extraction, inter-linguistic comparisons and discoveries or even to lexicographical resources. Its objectivity, reusability, multiplicity and applicability of uses, easy handling and quick access to large volume of data are just an example of their advantages over other types of limited resources like thesauri or dictionaries. By a way of example, new terms are coined on a daily basis and dictionaries cannot keep up with the rate of emergence of new terms

Arquitectura para coordenação em tempo-real de múltiplas unidades móveis autónomas

Doutoramento em Engenharia ElectrotécnicaInterest on using teams of mobile robots has been growing, due to their potential to cooperate for diverse purposes, such as rescue, de-mining, surveillance or even games such as robotic soccer. These applications require a real-time middleware and wireless communication protocol that can support an efficient and timely fusion of the perception data from different robots as well as the development of coordinated behaviours. Coordinating several autonomous robots towards achieving a common goal is currently a topic of high interest, which can be found in many application domains. Despite these different application domains, the technical problem of building an infrastructure to support the integration of the distributed perception and subsequent coordinated action is similar. This problem becomes tougher with stronger system dynamics, e.g., when the robots move faster or interact with fast objects, leading to tighter real-time constraints. This thesis work addressed computing architectures and wireless communication protocols to support efficient information sharing and coordination strategies taking into account the real-time nature of robot activities. The thesis makes two main claims. Firstly, we claim that despite the use of a wireless communication protocol that includes arbitration mechanisms, the self-organization of the team communications in a dynamic round that also accounts for variable team membership, effectively reduces collisions within the team, independently of its current composition, significantly improving the quality of the communications. We will validate this claim in terms of packet losses and communication latency. We show how such self-organization of the communications can be achieved in an efficient way with the Reconfigurable and Adaptive TDMA protocol. Secondly, we claim that the development of distributed perception, cooperation and coordinated action for teams of mobile robots can be simplified by using a shared memory middleware that replicates in each cooperating robot all necessary remote data, the Real-Time Database (RTDB) middleware. These remote data copies, which are updated in the background by the selforganizing communications protocol, are extended with age information automatically computed by the middleware and are locally accessible through fast primitives. We validate our claim showing a parsimonious use of the communication medium, improved timing information with respect to the shared data and the simplicity of use and effectiveness of the proposed middleware shown in several use cases, reinforced with a reasonable impact in the Middle Size League of RoboCup.O interesse na utilização de equipas multi-robô tem vindo a crescer, devido ao seu potencial para cooperarem na resolução de vários problemas, tais como salvamento, desminagem, vigilância e até futebol robótico. Estas aplicações requerem uma infraestrutura de comunicação sem fios, em tempo real, suportando a fusão eficiente e atempada dos dados sensoriais de diferentes robôs bem como o desenvolvimento de comportamentos coordenados. A coordenação de vários robôs autónomos com vista a um dado objectivo é actualmente um tópico que suscita grande interesse, e que pode ser encontrado em muitos domínios de aplicação. Apesar das diferenças entre domínios de aplicação, o problema técnico de construir uma infraestrutura para suportar a integração da percepção distribuída e das acções coordenadas é similar. O problema torna-se mais difícil à medida que o dinamismo dos robôs se acentua, por exemplo, no caso de se moverem mais rápido, ou de interagirem com objectos que se movimentam rapidamente, dando origem a restrições de tempo-real mais apertadas. Este trabalho centrou-se no desenvolvimento de arquitecturas computacionais e protocolos de comunicação sem fios para suporte à partilha de informação e à realização de acções coordenadas, levando em consideração as restrições de tempo-real. A tese apresenta duas afirmações principais. Em primeiro lugar, apesar do uso de um protocolo de comunicação sem fios que inclui mecanismos de arbitragem, a auto-organização das comunicações reduz as colisões na equipa, independentemente da sua composição em cada momento. Esta afirmação é validada em termos de perda de pacotes e latência da comunicação. Mostra-se também como a auto-organização das comunicações pode ser atingida através da utilização de um protocolo TDMA reconfigurável e adaptável sem sincronização de relógio. A segunda afirmação propõe a utilização de um sistema de memória partilhada, com replicação nos diferentes robôs, para suportar o desenvolvimento de mecanismos de percepção distribuída, fusão sensorial, cooperação e coordenação numa equipa de robôs. O sistema concreto que foi desenvolvido é designado como Base de Dados de Tempo Real (RTDB). Os dados remotos, que são actualizados de forma transparente pelo sistema de comunicações auto-organizado, são estendidos com a respectiva idade e são disponibilizados localmente a cada robô através de primitivas de acesso eficientes. A RTDB facilita a utilização parcimoniosa da rede e bem como a manutenção de informação temporal rigorosa. A simplicidade da integração da RTDB para diferentes aplicações permitiu a sua efectiva utilização em diferentes projectos, nomeadamente no âmbito do RoboCup

Portugal SB13: contribution of sustainable building to meet EU 20-20-20 targets

Proceedings of the International Conference Portugal SB13: contribution of sustainable building to meet EU 20-20-20 targetsThe international conference Portugal SB13 is organized by the University of Minho, the Technical University of Lisbon and the Portuguese Chapter of the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment in Guimarães, Portugal, from the 30th of October till the 1st of November 2013. This conference is included in the Sustainable Building Conference Series 2013-2014 (SB13-14) that are being organized all over the world. The event is supported by high prestige partners, such as the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC) and the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (iiSBE). Portugal SB13 is focused on the theme â Sustainable Building Contribution to Achieve the European Union 20-20-20 Targetsâ . These targets, known as the â EU 20-20-20â targets, set three key objectives for 2020: - A 20% reduction in EU greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels; - Raising the share of EU energy consumption produced from renewable resources to 20%; - A 20% improvement in the EU's energy efficiency. Building sector uses about 40% of global energy, 25% of global water, 40% of global resources and emit approximately 1/3 of the global greenhouse gas emissions (the largest contributor). Residential and commercial buildings consume approximately 60% of the worldâ s electricity. Existing buildings represent significant energy saving opportunities because their performance level is frequently far below the current efficiency potentials. Energy consumption in buildings can be reduced by 30 to 80% using proven and commercially available technologies. Investment in building energy efficiency is accompanied by significant direct and indirect savings, which help offset incremental costs, providing a short return on investment period. Therefore, buildings offer the greatest potential for achieving significant greenhouse gas emission reductions, at least cost, in developed and developing countries. On the other hand, there are many more issues related to the sustainability of the built environment than energy. The building sector is responsible for creating, modifying and improving the living environment of the humanity. Construction and buildings have considerable environmental impacts, consuming a significant proportion of limited resources of the planet including raw material, water, land and, of course, energy. The building sector is estimated to be worth 10% of global GDP (5.5 trillion EUR) and employs 111 million people. In developing countries, new sustainable construction opens enormous opportunities because of the population growth and the increasing prosperity, which stimulate the urbanization and the construction activities representing up to 40% of GDP. Therefore, building sustainably will result in healthier and more productive environments. The sustainability of the built environment, the construction industry and the related activities are a pressing issue facing all stakeholders in order to promote the Sustainable Development. The Portugal SB13 conference topics cover a wide range of up-to-date issues and the contributions received from the delegates reflect critical research and the best available practices in the Sustainable Building field. The issues presented include: - Nearly Zero Energy Buildings - Policies for Sustainable Construction - High Performance Sustainable Building Solutions - Design and Technologies for Energy Efficiency - Innovative Construction Systems - Building Sustainability Assessment Tools - Renovation and Retrofitting - Eco-Efficient Materials and Technologies - Urban Regeneration - Design for Life Cycle and Reuse - LCA of sustainable materials and technologies All the articles selected for presentation at the conference and published in these Proceedings, went through a refereed review process and were evaluated by, at least, two reviewers. The Organizers want to thank all the authors who have contributed with papers for publication in the proceedings and to all reviewers, whose efforts and hard work secured the high quality of all contributions to this conference. A special gratitude is also addressed to Eng. José Amarílio Barbosa and to Eng. Catarina Araújo that coordinated the Secretariat of the Conference. Finally, Portugal SB13 wants to address a special thank to CIB, UNEP, FIDIC and iiSBE for their support and wish great success for all the other SB13 events that are taking place all over the world

Text Similarity Between Concepts Extracted from Source Code and Documentation

Context: Constant evolution in software systems often results in its documentation losing sync with the content of the source code. The traceability research field has often helped in the past with the aim to recover links between code and documentation, when the two fell out of sync. Objective: The aim of this paper is to compare the concepts contained within the source code of a system with those extracted from its documentation, in order to detect how similar these two sets are. If vastly different, the difference between the two sets might indicate a considerable ageing of the documentation, and a need to update it. Methods: In this paper we reduce the source code of 50 software systems to a set of key terms, each containing the concepts of one of the systems sampled. At the same time, we reduce the documentation of each system to another set of key terms. We then use four different approaches for set comparison to detect how the sets are similar. Results: Using the well known Jaccard index as the benchmark for the comparisons, we have discovered that the cosine distance has excellent comparative powers, and depending on the pre-training of the machine learning model. In particular, the SpaCy and the FastText embeddings offer up to 80% and 90% similarity scores. Conclusion: For most of the sampled systems, the source code and the documentation tend to contain very similar concepts. Given the accuracy for one pre-trained model (e.g., FastText), it becomes also evident that a few systems show a measurable drift between the concepts contained in the documentation and in the source code.</p

Proceedings of The Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW 2010)

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-627/allproceedings.pdfInternational audienceMALLOW-2010 is a third edition of a series initiated in 2007 in Durham, and pursued in 2009 in Turin. The objective, as initially stated, is to "provide a venue where: the cost of participation was minimum; participants were able to attend various workshops, so fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization; there was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of time for networking, by maximizing the time participants spent together"

Locomoção bípede adaptativa a partir de uma única demonstração usando primitivas de movimento

Doutoramento em Engenharia EletrotécnicaEste trabalho aborda o problema de capacidade de imitação da locomoção humana através da utilização de trajetórias de baixo nível codificadas com primitivas de movimento e utilizá-las para depois generalizar para novas situações, partindo apenas de uma demonstração única. Assim, nesta linha de pensamento, os principais objetivos deste trabalho são dois: o primeiro é analisar, extrair e codificar demonstrações efetuadas por um humano, obtidas por um sistema de captura de movimento de forma a modelar tarefas de locomoção bípede. Contudo, esta transferência não está limitada à simples reprodução desses movimentos, requerendo uma evolução das capacidades para adaptação a novas situações, assim como lidar com perturbações inesperadas. Assim, o segundo objetivo é o desenvolvimento e avaliação de uma estrutura de controlo com capacidade de modelação das ações, de tal forma que a demonstração única apreendida possa ser modificada para o robô se adaptar a diversas situações, tendo em conta a sua dinâmica e o ambiente onde está inserido. A ideia por detrás desta abordagem é resolver o problema da generalização a partir de uma demonstração única, combinando para isso duas estruturas básicas. A primeira consiste num sistema gerador de padrões baseado em primitivas de movimento utilizando sistemas dinâmicos (DS). Esta abordagem de codificação de movimentos possui propriedades desejáveis que a torna ideal para geração de trajetórias, tais como a possibilidade de modificar determinados parâmetros em tempo real, tais como a amplitude ou a frequência do ciclo do movimento e robustez a pequenas perturbações. A segunda estrutura, que está embebida na anterior, é composta por um conjunto de osciladores acoplados em fase que organizam as ações de unidades funcionais de forma coordenada. Mudanças em determinadas condições, como o instante de contacto ou impactos com o solo, levam a modelos com múltiplas fases. Assim, em vez de forçar o movimento do robô a situações pré-determinadas de forma temporal, o gerador de padrões de movimento proposto explora a transição entre diferentes fases que surgem da interação do robô com o ambiente, despoletadas por eventos sensoriais. A abordagem proposta é testada numa estrutura de simulação dinâmica, sendo que várias experiências são efetuadas para avaliar os métodos e o desempenho dos mesmos.This work addresses the problem of learning to imitate human locomotion actions through low-level trajectories encoded with motion primitives and generalizing them to new situations from a single demonstration. In this line of thought, the main objectives of this work are twofold: The first is to analyze, extract and encode human demonstrations taken from motion capture data in order to model biped locomotion tasks. However, transferring motion skills from humans to robots is not limited to the simple reproduction, but requires the evaluation of their ability to adapt to new situations, as well as to deal with unexpected disturbances. Therefore, the second objective is to develop and evaluate a control framework for action shaping such that the single-demonstration can be modulated to varying situations, taking into account the dynamics of the robot and its environment. The idea behind the approach is to address the problem of generalization from a single-demonstration by combining two basic structures. The first structure is a pattern generator system consisting of movement primitives learned and modelled by dynamical systems (DS). This encoding approach possesses desirable properties that make them well-suited for trajectory generation, namely the possibility to change parameters online such as the amplitude and the frequency of the limit cycle and the intrinsic robustness against small perturbations. The second structure, which is embedded in the previous one, consists of coupled phase oscillators that organize actions into functional coordinated units. The changing contact conditions plus the associated impacts with the ground lead to models with multiple phases. Instead of forcing the robot’s motion into a predefined fixed timing, the proposed pattern generator explores transition between phases that emerge from the interaction of the robot system with the environment, triggered by sensor-driven events. The proposed approach is tested in a dynamics simulation framework and several experiments are conducted to validate the methods and to assess the performance of a humanoid robot

Proceedings of the European Conference on Agricultural Engineering AgEng2021

This proceedings book results from the AgEng2021 Agricultural Engineering Conference under auspices of the European Society of Agricultural Engineers, held in an online format based on the University of Évora, Portugal, from 4 to 8 July 2021. This book contains the full papers of a selection of abstracts that were the base for the oral presentations and posters presented at the conference. Presentations were distributed in eleven thematic areas: Artificial Intelligence, data processing and management; Automation, robotics and sensor technology; Circular Economy; Education and Rural development; Energy and bioenergy; Integrated and sustainable Farming systems; New application technologies and mechanisation; Post-harvest technologies; Smart farming / Precision agriculture; Soil, land and water engineering; Sustainable production in Farm buildings