Natural language research announcements

[Ming-Wei Chang <mchang21 AT uiuc.edu>]

Dear faculty and students,

     This is a reminder for the AIIS seminar at 4:00pm this afternoon
  (room 3405).  A Ph.D. candidate of our department, Lin Tan, will give
  an interesting talk (details below). The room number is 3405. Hope to
  see you there!

Best,

Ming-Wei


Ming-Wei Chang 
<mchang21 AT uiuc.edu>
 writes:

> Dear faculty and students,
>
> A Ph.D. candidate of our department, Lin Tan, will give a talk (details
> below) for the AIIS seminar at 4:00 pm, Mar 5th (this Thursday). The
> room number is 3405. Hope to see you there!
>
> /* Leveraging Code Comments to Improve Software Reliability */
>
> Software reliability is critically important. This work focuses on
> addressing fundamental challenges of software reliability: obtaining
> accurate program specifications and discovering tools/languages
> limitations. In this talk, I will show that comments provide a great
> data source for obtaining important information, including
> specifications and problems of current tools/languages. First, I will
> present a novel approach, iComment, which is the first work to
> automatically extract specifications from comments written in natural
> language and use these specifications to detect comment-code
> inconsistencies, i.e., software bugs and bad comments. Our evaluation
> on large real-world software such as the Linux kernel, Mozilla, Apache
> and Wine and 2 types of comments shows that iComment effectively
> extracted 1832 specifications and detected 60 new bugs and bad
> comments. iComment combines techniques from different areas, including
> natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, information
> retrieval, program analysis and statistics. To help explain the pros
> and cons of extracting specifications from comments compared to
> extracting specifications from code, I will briefly discuss AutoISES,
> which infers security specifications by statically analyzing source
> code, and then directly use these specifications to automatically
> detect security bugs/violations. I will also briefly present,
> cComment, which studies comment semantics and characteristics to
> further understand what other comments can be utilized, how we can
> utilize them, and what important problems/limitations they reveal. We
> discovered many interesting findings that can guide the design of new
> languages and tools for improving reliability, programmer
> productivity, software evolution, etc.
>
>
> Bio:
>
> Lin Tan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at
> the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research areas
> include software systems, software reliability and security, with a
> focus on using interdisciplinary techniques such as machine learning,
> data mining, computer architecture and program analysis to address
> systems reliability problems. She currently holds an IBM
> Ph.D. Fellowship. Her recent work on architectural support for
> intrusion detection has been successfully transferred and licensed
> since 2006, and was selected into the IEEE Micro's Top Picks 2006.
>
> Thank you,
> Ming-Wei
>
>
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