Translating Platform-independent Code into Natural Language Texts

Håkan Burden, Rogardt Heldal

2013

Abstract

Understanding software artifacts is not only time-consuming, without the proper training and experience it can be impossible. From a model-driven perspective there are two benefits from translating platform-independent models into natural language texts: First, the non-functional properties of the solution have already been omitted meaning that the translations focus on describing the functional behaviour of the system. Second, the platform-independent models are reusable across platforms and so are the translations generated from them. As a proof-of-concept a platform-independent Action language is translated into natural language texts through the framework of model transformations.

References

  1. Angelov, K. (2011). The Mechanics of the Grammatical Framework. PhD thesis, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
  2. Angelov, K. and Ranta, A. (2009). Implementing Controlled Languages in GF. In Controlled Natural Language, Workshop on Controlled Natural Language, CNL 2009, Marettimo Island, Italy, June 8-10, 2009, volume 5972 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 82-101. Springer Verlag.
  3. Arlow, J., Emmerich, W., and Quinn, J. (1999). Literate Modelling - Capturing Business Knowledge with the UML. In Selected papers from the First International Workshop on The Unified Modeling Language UML'98: Beyond the Notation, pages 189-199, London, UK. Springer-Verlag.
  4. Atkinson, C. and Kuhne, T. (2003). Model-driven development: a metamodeling foundation. IEEE Software, 20(5):36 - 41.
  5. Burke, D. A. and Johannisson, K. (2005). Translating Formal Software Specifications to Natural Language. In Blache, P., Stabler, E. P., Busquets, J., and Moot, R., editors, LACL, volume 3492 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 51-66. Springer Verlag.
  6. Chomsky, N. (1959). On certain formal properties of grammars. Information and Control, 2:137-167.
  7. Clark, P., Murray, W. R., Harrison, P., and Thompson, J. A. (2009). Naturalness vs. Predictability: A Key Debate in Controlled Languages. In Controlled Natural Language, Workshop on Controlled Natural Language, CNL 2009, Marettimo Island, Italy, June 8-10, 2009, volume 5972 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 65-81. Springer Verlag.
  8. Forward, A. and Lethbridge, T. C. (2008). Problems and Opportunities for Model-Centric Versus Code-Centric Software Development: A Survey of Software Professionals. In Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Models in Software Engineering, MiSE 7808, pages 27-32, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
  9. Hähnle, R., Johannisson, K., and Ranta, A. (2002). An Authoring Tool for Informal and Formal Requirements Specifications. In Kutsche, R.-D. and Weber, H., editors, FASE, volume 2306 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 233-248. Springer.
  10. Haiduc, S., Aponte, J., Moreno, L., and Marcus, A. (2010). On the Use of Automated Text Summarization Techniques for Summarizing Source Code. In Antoniol, G., Pinzger, M., and Chikofsky, E. J., editors, WCRE, pages 35-44. IEEE Computer Society.
  11. Heldal, R. and Johannisson, K. (2006). Customer Validation of Formal Contracts. In OCL for (Meta-)Models in Multiple Application Domains, pages 13-25, Genova, Italy.
  12. Jézéquel, J.-M., Combemale, B., Derrien, S., Guy, C., and Rajopadhye, S. (2012). Bridging the Chasm Between MDE and the World of Compilation. Journal of Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM), pages 1-17.
  13. Kleppe, A., Warmer, J., and Bast, W. (2005). MDA Explained: The Model Driven ArchitectureTM: Practice and Promise. Addison-Wesley Professional.
  14. Lange, C. F. J., Bois, B. D., Chaudron, M. R. V., and Demeyer, S. (2006). An experimental investigation of UML modeling conventions. In Nierstrasz, O., Whittle, J., Harel, D., and Reggio, G., editors, MoDELS, volume 4199 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 27-41. Springer.
  15. Larman, C. (2004). Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development (3rd Edition). Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA.
  16. Ljunglöf, P. (2011). Editing Syntax Trees on the Surface. In Nodalida'11: 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics, volume 11, Riga, Latvia. NEALT Proceedings Series.
  17. Mccarthy, J. (1962). Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation. In Proceedings of the Information Processing Congress, pages 21-28. North-Holland.
  18. Mellor, S. J. and Balcer, M. (2002). Executable UML: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architectures. AddisonWesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA.
  19. Mellor, S. J., Kendall, S., Uhl, A., and Weise, D. (2004). MDA Distilled. Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, USA.
  20. Mens, T. and Gorp, P. V. (2006). A Taxonomy of Model Transformation. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 152:125-142.
  21. Miller, J. and Mukerji, J. (2003). MDA guide version 1.0.1. Technical report, Object Management Group (OMG).
  22. Mohagheghi, P. and Aagedal, J. (2007). Evaluating quality in model-driven engineering. In MISE 7807: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Modeling in Software Engineering, page 6, Washington, DC, USA. IEEE Computer Society.
  23. Nicolás, J. and Álvarez, J. A. T. (2009). On the generation of requirements specifications from software engineering models: A systematic literature review. Information & Software Technology, 51(9):1291-1307.
  24. Perry, D. E. and Wolf, A. L. (1992). Foundations for the study of software architecture. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes, 17:40-52.
  25. Ranta, A. (2008). Grammars as software libraries. In Huet, G., Plotkin, G., Lévy, J.-J., and Bertot, Y., editors, From semantics to computer science: essays in honor of Gilles Kahn. Cambridge University Press.
  26. Ranta, A. (2009). The GF Grammar Resource Library. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 2(2).
  27. Ranta, A. (2011). Grammatical Framework: Programming with Multilingual Grammars. CSLI Publications, Stanford.
  28. Rastkar, S., Murphy, G. C., and Bradley, A. W. J. (2011). Generating natural language summaries for crosscutting source code concerns. In ICSM, pages 103-112. IEEE.
  29. Reiter, E. and Dale, R. (1997). Building applied natural language generation systems. Nat. Lang. Eng., 3:57- 87.
  30. Shlaer, S. and Mellor, S. J. (1992). Object lifecycles: modeling the world in states. Yourdon Press, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA.
  31. Spreeuwenberg, S., Van Grondelle, J., Heller, R., and Grijzen, G. (2010). Design of a cnl to involve domain experts in modelling. In Rosner, M. and Fuchs, N., editors, CNL 2010 Second Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
  32. Sridhara, G., Hill, E., Muppaneni, D., Pollock, L., and Vijay-Shanker, K. (2010). Towards automatically generating summary comments for Java methods. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering, ASE 7810, pages 43-52, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
  33. Sridhara, G., Pollock, L., and Vijay-Shanker, K. (2011). Automatically detecting and describing high level actions within methods. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 7811, pages 101-110, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
  34. Starr, L. (2001). Executable UML: How to Build Class Models. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA.
  35. Stevens, P. (2007). A Landscape of Bidirectional Model Transformations. In Lämmel, R., Visser, J., and Saraiva, J., editors, GTTSE, volume 5235 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 408-424. Springer.
  36. Warmer, J. and Kleppe, A. (2003). The Object Constraint Language: Getting Your Models Ready for MDA. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 2 edition.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Burden H. and Heldal R. (2013). Translating Platform-independent Code into Natural Language Texts . In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD, ISBN 978-989-8565-42-6, pages 281-290. DOI: 10.5220/0004312102810290


in Bibtex Style

@conference{modelsward13,
author={Håkan Burden and Rogardt Heldal},
title={Translating Platform-independent Code into Natural Language Texts},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,},
year={2013},
pages={281-290},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004312102810290},
isbn={978-989-8565-42-6},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,
TI - Translating Platform-independent Code into Natural Language Texts
SN - 978-989-8565-42-6
AU - Burden H.
AU - Heldal R.
PY - 2013
SP - 281
EP - 290
DO - 10.5220/0004312102810290