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Showing posts from February, 2010

Our corpus is your corpus.

[ Here is our P3P corpus , be it your corpus as well. ] Giving away your corpus (in empirical language analysis or elsewhere) is perhaps nothing extremely established, but it's nothing original or strange either. It does make sense a lot! Stop limiting the impact of your research efforts! Stop wasting the time of your community members! Sharing corpora is one of these many good ideas of Research 2.0: see SSE'10 (and friend events ), eScience @ Microsoft, R2oSE , ... Computer Science vs. Science When you do academic CS research in programming- or software development-related contexts , then the culture of validation is these days such that you are often expected to provide online access to your program, application, library, tool, what have you as an implementation or illustration. There are various open-source repositories that are used to this end--as a backend (a storage facility), but any sort of author-hosted download locations are also used widely. In basic terms, if ...

An ambitious course on programming paradigms, semantics, and types

We have completed this course . I hope others find the design or some of the material helpful. See more about reuse below. Coverage - Parsing and interpretation in Prolog - Basics of small-step and big-step semantics - Basics of untyped and typed lambda calculi - Introduction to Haskell - Basics of denotational semantics - Denotational semantics in Haskell - Basics of static program analysis - Static program analysis in Haskell - OO programming in Haskell - The Expression Problem - Basics of Constraint-Logic Programming - Basics of Process Algebra (CCS) - ... a few more specialized lectures Characteristics - English as the course language - Slides, videos , exercises available online publicly - 42 hours (45mins each) of lectures over 4 months - 12 programming-oriented, interactive labs - Transparent scheme for midterm and final exam - Heavy reuse of material from other courses - Use of Twitter for notification and aggregation Experiences This course is my only chance to tell many st...

Empirical Language Analysis

We have been trying to understand the language P3P . Ok, its pretty simple to say what it is. It's a small (domain-specific, non-executable) language for privacy policies and it's used by web sites and checked by user agents (potentially part of browsers). Arguably, understanding is limited if you look at online samples and syntax definition alone. So we figured we had to understand usage of the language in order to understand the language . Here is the link to the paper: http://userpages.uni-koblenz.de/~laemmel/p3p/ Joint work with Ekaterina Pek Keywords: Software Language Engineering Domain-Specific Languages Empirical Analysis Policy Languages P3P Abstract : P3P is the policy language with which web sites declare the intended use of data that is collected about users of the site. We have systematically collected P3P-based privacy policies from web sites listed in the Google directory, and analysed the resulting corpus with regard to metrics and cloning of policies, adherence...