Modular Language Research Articles

Modular language product lines: concept, tool and analysis

AbstractModelling languages are intensively used in paradigms like model-driven engineering to automate all tasks of the development process. These languages may have variants, in which case the need arises to deal with language families rather than with individual languages. However, specifying the syntax and semantics of each language variant separately in an enumerative way is costly, hinders reuse across variants, and may yield inconsistent semantics between variants. Hence, we propose a novel, modular and compositional approach to describing product lines of modelling languages. It enables the incremental definition of language families by means of modules comprising meta-model fragments, graph transformation rules, and rule extensions. Language variants are configured by selecting the desired modules, which entails the composition of a language meta-model and a set of rules defining its semantics. This paper describes: a theory for checking well-formedness, instantiability, and consistent semantics of all languages within the family; an implementation as an Eclipse plugin; and an evaluation reporting drastic specification size and analysis time reduction in comparison to an enumerative approach.

Monitoring of the Development of Academic Meta-Languages Based on Modular Foreign Language Teaching in a Multidisciplinary University

Monitoring of the Development of Academic Meta-Languages Based on Modular Foreign Language Teaching in a Multidisciplinary University

Overcoming Language Priors in VQA via Decomposed Linguistic Representations

Most existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) models overly rely on language priors between questions and answers. In this paper, we present a novel method of language attention-based VQA that learns decomposed linguistic representations of questions and utilizes the representations to infer answers for overcoming language priors. We introduce a modular language attention mechanism to parse a question into three phrase representations: type representation, object representation, and concept representation. We use the type representation to identify the question type and the possible answer set (yes/no or specific concepts such as colors or numbers), and the object representation to focus on the relevant region of an image. The concept representation is verified with the attended region to infer the final answer. The proposed method decouples the language-based concept discovery and vision-based concept verification in the process of answer inference to prevent language priors from dominating the answering process. Experiments on the VQA-CP dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Actor\u2019s social complexity: a proposal for managing the iStar model

Complex systems are inherent to modern society, in which individuals, organizations, and computational elements relate with each other to achieve a predefined purpose, which transcends individual goals. In this context, these systems’ complexity is originated by the large number of parts interacting in a non-simple way, given the properties of these parts and the laws, as well as by the wishes that govern these interactions. Also, in organizations, there is a need for additional information to understand this universe considering the already consolidated static and dynamic dimensions. With this purpose, the iStar framework was developed to capture and represent intentional and social information in two views: Strategic Dependency (SD) and Strategic Rationale (SR). This framework, however, does not offer alternatives to deal with the complexity that is inherent to modern society systems, which is related to a large number of parts interacting, when modeled from their views. The problem is present in monolithic languages because they do not consist of building blocks, such as subprocesses or modules. Despite this problem, the iStar framework provides modeling versatility by combining goal-oriented paradigms and agents. Another positive point is the focus on intentional and social properties, thus providing expressiveness aligned with the modern society’s demand, in which everything is related. Therefore, the objective of this research was to provide ways for the iStar framework to deal with the complexity presented by complex systems and, consequently, make iStar models understandable to be used, in a given context. The proposal is based on a state of the art review to create an interdependente part for the iStar models and will make the construction of views as a composition of these parts possible. To make it happen, and considering its benefits, a textual notation (SMiLe - Scalable Modular iStar Language) was conceived and applied to support the architecture within this social modeling scenario. The proposal and its artifacts were submitted to a proof of concept, and then, through adjustments, an evaluation was carried by the users through a case study. The results pointed to evidence of the possible management of iStar model and an improvement in the understanding of this model, suggesting that the proposed solution is a feasible alternative for the established objective.

Towards a modular language curriculum for using tasks

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-supported language teaching (TSLT) are often seen as incompatible as they draw on different theories of language learning and language teaching. The position adopted in this article, however, is that both approaches are needed especially in instructional contexts where ‘pure’ task-based teaching may be problematic for various reasons. The article makes a case for a modular curriculum consisting of separate (i.e. non-integrated) task-based and structure-based components. Different curriculum models are considered in the light of what is known about how a second language is learned. The model that is proposed assumes the importance of developing fluency first. It consists of a primary task-based module implemented with focus-on-form (Long, 1991) and, once a basic fluency has been achieved, supported by a secondary structural module to provide for explicit accuracy-oriented work to counteract learned selective attention (N. Ellis, 2006): one of the main sources of persistent error. The article also addresses the content and grading of the task-based and structural modules. It considers the factors that need to be considered in the vertical and horizontal grading of tasks but also points out that, for the time being, syllabus designers will have to draw on their experience and intuition as much as on research to make decisions about how to sequence tasks. An argument is presented for treating the structural component as a checklist rather than as a syllabus so as to allow teachers to address selectively those features that are found to be problematic for their students when they perform tasks.

Toward a Better Understanding of the Cortical Function: Entrained Periodical Modular Language Decoding

The use of speech for organizing collective activity is the hallmark of our species. For such a purpose, the speaker’s brain activity have to modulate that of the listener, what requires the sound the speaker produces to synchronize listener's brain activity. Recent results reported in the literature show that speech production and decoding result from a Cortical Oscillatory Modular Processing (COMP). In this context, speech comprehension depends on how speaker’s COMPs produce a modular organized speech to entrain listener’s COMP speech decoding. The purpose of the present paper is to investigate this process by analyzing the EEG recorded during a text listening. The sentences of this text were composed by 5 clauses of 2 seconds duration each. Event Related Activity (ERA) technique, Polynomial Regression, Spectral and LORETA analyses were used to identify the different COMP components, to study the cortical oscillatory activity supporting this processing and to try to localize the sources of these oscillations. ERA and Polynomial analyses show that clause decoding correlates to identified COMPs that are composed by several different cyclic components. Spectral and LORETA analyses revealed that three components are generated by different time locking oscillatory activities recorded at many different and widely distributed cortical areas. A model to reconstruct the EEG from these identified cyclic components is proposed and shown to statistically mimic the recorded cortical activity. Based on all these results, a hypothesis for linking speech decoding and cyclic COMP activity is presented and discussed. This is one of three paper exploring this idea.

An Immigration Policy by Any Other Name: Semantics of Immigration to Japan

This survey examines the ways in which the Japanese government controls the flow of foreign migrants across and within its borders. It does this in practice by taking steps to admit increasing numbers of migrants from abroad, without using the term imin (immigrants). Although a diverse body of migrants resides in and contributes to the country, the taboo surrounding the use of the word imin allays public concern for increasing diversity while allowing for de facto long-term migration, including naturalization, to occur. Through analyses of key documents, news articles, an interview, as well as through the author’s experience as a participant in a government panel on immigration control policy, the survey seeks to demonstrate how important the politics of naming (Parkin, David. 1984. ‘Political Language’. Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 345–165; Poerksen, Uwe. 1995. Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press) is to the reality of immigration to Japan.

Automated reasoning for web page layout

Web pages define their appearance using Cascading Style Sheets, a modular language for layout of tree-structured documents. In principle, using CSS is easy: the developer specifies declarative constraints on the layout of an HTML document (such as the positioning of nodes in the HTML tree), and the browser solves the constraints to produce a box-based rendering of that document. In practice, however, the subtleties of CSS semantics make it difficult to develop stylesheets that produce the intended layout across different user preferences and browser settings. This paper presents the first mechanized formalization of a substantial fragment of the CSS semantics. This formalization is equipped with an efficient reduction to the theory of quantifier-free linear real arithmetic, enabling effective automated reasoning about CSS stylesheets and their behavior. We implement this reduction in Cassius, a solver-aided framework for building semantics-aware tools for CSS. To demonstrate the utility of Cassius, we prototype new tools for automated verification, debugging, and synthesis of CSS code. We show that these tools work on fragments of real-world websites, and that Cassius is a practical first step toward solver-aided programming for the web.

CoreALMlib: An library translated from the Component Library

AbstractThis paper presents CoreALMlib, an $\mathscr{ALM}$ library of commonsense knowledge about dynamic domains. The library was obtained by translating part of the Component Library (CLib) into the modular action language $\mathscr{ALM}$. CLib consists of general reusable and composable commonsense concepts, selected based on a thorough study of ontological and lexical resources. Our translation targets CLibstates (i.e., fluents) and actions. The resulting $\mathscr{ALM}$ library contains the descriptions of 123 action classes grouped into 43 reusable modules that are organized into a hierarchy. It is made available online and of interest to researchers in the action language, answer-set programming, and natural language understanding communities. We believe that our translation has two main advantages over its CLib counterpart: (i) it specifies axioms about actions in a more elaboration tolerant and readable way, and (ii) it can be seamlessly integrated with ASP reasoning algorithms (e.g., for planning and postdiction). In contrast, axioms are described in CLib using STRIPS-like operators, and CLib's inference engine cannot handle planning nor postdiction.

스크래치에 기반한 로봇 교육에 대한 연구

The conventional educational robots, which are commonly industrial robots or toy robots, use text-based programming to teach the students. Therefore, students have difficulty in studying robotics due to the difficulties of text based language. The developed robot in this study have a camera, which have the color tracking function, and it has various sensors and actuators. It supports the open hardware and uses graphic language based programming. The developed educational robot is programmed by Scratch, which uses graphic modular language. We also present a curriculum, which is based upon the developed robot and Scratch. We applied the robot and curriculum to the primary school students. We obtained satisfactory results comparing it with the conventional robot education. Furthermore, the imagination and execution ability of students showed enhancement in learning robotics. Thus, this fact means the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Modular language implementation in Rascal – experience report

All software evolves, and programming languages and programming language tools are no exception. And just like in ordinary software construction, modular implementations can help ease the process of changing a language implementation and its dependent tools. However, the syntactic and semantic dependencies between language features make this a challenging problem. In this paper we detail how programming languages can be implemented in a modular fashion using the Rascal meta-programming language. Rascal supports extensible definition of concrete syntax, abstract syntax and operations on concrete and abstract syntax trees like matching, traversal and transformation. As a result, new language features can be added without having to change existing code. As a case study, we detail our solution of the LDTA'11 Tool Challenge: a modular implementation of Oberon-0, a relatively simple imperative programming language. The approach we sketch can be applied equally well to the implementation of domain-specific languages.

A modular specification of Oberon0 using the Silver attribute grammar system

This paper describes an implementation of Oberon0 using the Silver attribute grammar system for the Tool Challenge at the 2011 International Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools, and Applications. Silver was developed to study how independently-developed language extension specifications can be imported into a host language specification to define a new custom extended language. Thus it contains many features useful in modular language specification, such as forwarding, higher-order attributes, reference/remote attributes, and a simplified form of collection attributes. These are discussed in the context of the Oberon0 specification presented here.

Modular action language

AbstractThe paper introduces a new modular action language,${\mathcal ALM}$, and illustrates the methodology of its use. It is based on the approach of Gelfond and Lifschitz (1993,Journal of Logic Programming 17, 2–4, 301–321; 1998,Electronic Transactions on AI 3, 16, 193–210) in which a high-level action language is used as a front end for a logic programming system description. The resulting logic programming representation is used to perform various computational tasks. The methodology based on existing action languages works well for small and even medium size systems, but is not meant to deal with larger systems that requirestructuring of knowledge.$\mathcal{ALM}$is meant to remedy this problem. Structuring of knowledge in${\mathcal ALM}$is supported by the concepts ofmodule(a formal description of a specific piece of knowledge packaged as a unit),module hierarchy, andlibrary, and by the division of a system description of${\mathcal ALM}$into two parts:theoryandstructure. Atheoryconsists of one or more modules with a common theme, possibly organized into a module hierarchy based on adependency relation. It contains declarations of sorts, attributes, and properties of the domain together with axioms describing them.Structuresare used to describe the domain's objects. These features, together with the means for defining classes of a domain as special cases of previously defined ones, facilitate the stepwise development, testing, and readability of a knowledge base, as well as the creation of knowledge representation libraries.

Neverlang: A framework for feature-oriented language development

Reuse in programming language development is an open research problem. Many authors have proposed frameworks for modular language development. These frameworks focus on maximizing code reuse, providing primitives for componentizing language implementations. There is also an open debate on combining feature-orientation with modular language development. Feature-oriented programming is a vision of computer programming in which features can be implemented separately, and then combined to build a variety of software products. However, even though feature-orientation and modular programming are strongly connected, modular language development frameworks are not usually meant primarily for feature-oriented language definition. In this paper we present a model of language development that puts feature implementation at the center, and describe its implementation in the Neverlang framework. The model has been evaluated through several languages implementations: in this paper, a state machine language is used as a means of comparison with other frameworks, and a JavaScript interpreter implementation is used to further illustrate the benefits that our model provides.

MATHEMATICAL MODEL TRANSLATION OF NATURAL LANGUAGE QUERIES USING ABSTRACT QUERY LANGUAGE ABSTRACT

This article describes construction and investigation the mathematical model of natural query language translation with using an abstract query language. Abstract query language allows separating the problem of the processing natural language texts with using the linguistic knowledge from a problem of generation target query. Separation these tasks enables the construction modular natural language interface, which will be determined the same time translation algorithms to different sources of structured data in different target language queries using subsets of linguistic knowledge bases describing the desired subject area. In the proposed mathematical model is given a way to describe the concepts and relationships between them. With the help of concepts and relations between them, determined the linguistic knowledge base is used in the algorithm of translation. So, conversion of NL-queries to the abstract queries is reduced to sequential application of constructs for the purpose of separation from NL-queries of concepts of data domain, their components and the relations in between and to display of the selected concepts to a data model of the target structured data source.

XPL: A language for modular homogeneous language embedding

Languages that are used for Software Language Engineering (SLE) offer a range of features that support the construction and deployment of new languages. SLE languages offer features for constructing and processing syntax and defining the semantics of language features. New languages may be embedded within an existing language (internal) or may be stand-alone (external). Modularity is a desirable SLE property for which there is no generally agreed approach. This article analyses the current tools for SLE and identifies the key features that are common. It then proposes a language called XPL that supports these features. XPL is higher-order and allows languages to be constructed and manipulated as first-class elements and therefore can be used to represent a range of approaches to modular language definition. This is validated by using XPL to define the notion of a language module that supports modular language construction and language transformation.

Extending Linear Temporal Logic with Clocks to Object-Z

Object-Z, an extension to formal specification language Z, is good for describing large scale Object-Oriented software specification. While Object-Z has found application in a number of areas, its utility is limited by its inability to specify continuous variables and real-time constraints. Linear temporal logic can describe real-time system, but it can not deal with time variables well and also can not describe formal specification modularly. This paper extends linear temporal logic with clocks (LTLC) and presents an approach to adding linear temporal logic with clocks to Object-Z. Extended Object-Z with LTLC, a modular formal specification language, is a minimum extension of the syntax and semantics of Object-Z. The main advantage of this extension lies in that it is convenient to describe and verify the complex real-time software specification.

Vibration Testing System for Ventilator Based on Virtual Instrument

To obtain reliable test data of ventilator vibration and overcome defects of the traditional vibration test methods such as complicated instruments, low reliability, high costs and so on, the vibration measurement and analytical system for ventilator is established based on the virtual instrument technology using circulating cooling circuit, advanced accelerometers and signal acquisition. The program for acquisition and process procedure of vibration data are compiled with LabVIEW which is the graphical and modular programming language. The structure, function, design idea and theoretical basis of hardware and software systems for the test are described respectively. It proves that this system is more accurate and practical than conventional vibration meter.

An Instance to Extend Object-Z Formal Specification

Object-Z, an extension to formal specification language Z, is good for describing large scale Object-Oriented software specification. This paper introduces Real-Time Object-Z and describes the characters of real-time system: delay, timeout and multithread. Real-Time Object-Z consists two parts: functional specification and filter specification. While Object-Z has found application in a number of areas, its utility is limited by its inability to specify continuous variables and real-time constraints. The main benefit is that it is convenient to deal with the timing variables defined in the specification developed with our approach. The effective specification after applying filter part to functional part holds the form of specification developed with Object-Z. Expanded Object-Z, a modular formal specification language, is a minimum extension of the syntax and semantics of Object-Z. The main advantage of this extension lies in that it is convenient to describe and verify the complex real-time software specification.

Verification of Modular Diagnosability With Local Specifications for Discrete-Event Systems

In this paper, we study the diagnosability verification for modular discrete-event systems (DESs), i.e., DESs that are composed of multiple components. We focus on a particular modular architecture, where each fault in the system must be uniquely identified by the modular component where it occurs and solely based on event observations of that component. Hence, all diagnostic computations for faults to be detected in this architecture can be performed locally on the respective modular component, and the obtained diagnosis information is only relevant for that component. We define the condition of modular language diagnosability with local specifications (MDLS) in order to capture that each fault can indeed be detected in this modular architecture. Then, we show that MDLS can be formulated as a specific language-diagnosability problem. As the main contribution of this paper, we develop an incremental abstraction-based approach for the verification of MDLS, which is based on projections that fulfill the loop-preserving observer condition. In particular, our approach efficiently avoids the construction of a global system model, which is infeasible for systems of realistic size. Furthermore, we do not rely on the assumption of a live global plant, which is prevalent in previous diagnosability methods for modular DESs. We illustrate our approach and its computational savings by a manufacturing system example.