<p>Software verification is an important part of software development and themost practical way to do this today is through dynamic testing. This reportexplains concepts connected to verification and testing and also presents thetesting-framework Trassel developed during the writing of this report.Constructing domain specific languages and tools by using an existinglanguage as a starting ground can be a good strategy for solving certainproblems, this was tried with Trassel where the description-language forwriting test-cases was written as a DSL using Python as the host-language.</p>

Les travaux présentés dans cette thèse visent à faciliter le développement de ressources pour le traitement automatique des langues. Les ressources de ce type prennent des formes très diverses, en raison de l’existence de différents niveaux d’étude de la langue (syntaxe, morphologie, sémantique,. . . ) et de différents formalismes proposés pour la description des langues à chacun de ces niveaux. Les formalismes faisant intervenir différents types de structures, un unique langage de description n’est pas suffisant : il est nécessaire pour chaque formalisme de créer un langage dédié (ou DSL), et d’implémenter un nouvel outil utilisant ce langage, ce qui est une tâche longue et complexe. Pour cette raison, nous proposons dans cette thèse une méthode pour assembler modulairement, et adapter, des cadres de développement spécifiques à des tâches de génération de ressources langagières. Les cadres de développement créés sont construits autour des concepts fondamentaux de l’approche XMG (eXtensible MetaGrammar), à savoir disposer d’un langage de description permettant la définition modulaire d’abstractions sur des structures linguistiques, ainsi que leur combinaison non-déterministe (c’est à dire au moyen des opérateurs logiques de conjonction et disjonction). La méthode se base sur l’assemblage d’un langage de description à partir de briques réutilisables, et d’après un fichier unique de spécification. L’intégralité de la chaîne de traitement pour le DSL ainsi défini est assemblée automatiquement d’après cette même spécification. Nous avons dans un premier temps validé cette approche en recréant l’outil XMG à partir de briques élémentaires. Des collaborations avec des linguistes nous ont également amené à assembler des compilateurs permettant la description de la morphologie de l’Ikota (langue bantoue) et de la sémantique (au moyen de la théorie des frames). / The work presented in this thesis aim at facilitating the development of resources for natural language processing. Resources of this type take different forms, because of the existence of several levels of linguistic description (syntax, morphology, semantics, . . . ) and of several formalisms proposed for the description of natural languages at each one of these levels. The formalisms featuring different types of structures, a unique description language is not enough: it is necessary to create a domain specific language (or DSL) for every formalism, and to implement a new tool which uses this language, which is a long a complex task. For this reason, we propose in this thesis a method to assemble in a modular way development frameworks specific to tasks of linguistic resource generation. The frameworks assembled thanks to our method are based on the fundamental concepts of the XMG (eXtensible MetaGrammar) approach, allowing the generation of tree based grammars. The method is based on the assembling of a description language from reusable bricks, and according to a unique specification file. The totality of the processing chain for the DSL is automatically assembled thanks to the same specification. In a first time, we validated this approach by recreating the XMG tool from elementary bricks. Some collaborations with linguists also brought us to assemble compilers allowing the description of morphology and semantics.

Today it is realized by industry that automation of software development leads to increased productivity, maintainability and higher quality. Model-Driven Development (MDD) aims to replace manual software development methods by automated methods using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to express domain concepts effectively. Main actors in software industry, Microsoft and IBM have recognized the need to provide technologies and tools to allow building DSLs to support MDD. On the one hand, Microsoft is building DSL Tools integrated in Visual Studio 2005; on the other hand IBM is contributing to the development of Eclipse Modeling Frameworks (EMF/GEF/GMF), both tools aim to make development and deployment of DSLs easier. Software practitioners seek for guidelines regarding how to adopt these tools. In this thesis, the author presents the current state-of-the-art in MDD standards and Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM). Furthermore, the author presents current state-of-the-tools for DSM and performs a comparison of Microsoft DSL Tools and Eclipse EMF/GEF/GMF Frameworks based on a set of evaluation criteria. For the purpose of comparison the author developed two DSL designers (one by using each DSM tool). Based on the experiences gained in development of these DSL designers, the author prepared guidelines regarding how to adopt these tools to existing development environments as well as their advantages and drawbacks.

Software verification is an important part of software development and themost practical way to do this today is through dynamic testing. This reportexplains concepts connected to verification and testing and also presents thetesting-framework Trassel developed during the writing of this report.Constructing domain specific languages and tools by using an existinglanguage as a starting ground can be a good strategy for solving certainproblems, this was tried with Trassel where the description-language forwriting test-cases was written as a DSL using Python as the host-language.

No description available.

The ideals of exact modeling, and of putting off approximations as long as possible, make Bayesian practice both successful and difficult. Languages for modeling probabilistic processes, whose implementations answer questions about them under asserted conditions, promise to ease much of the difficulty. Unfortunately, very few of these languages have mathematical specifications. This makes them difficult to trust: there is no way to distinguish between an implementation error and a feature, and there is no standard by which to prove optimizations correct. Further, because the languages are based on the incomplete theories of probability typically used in Bayesian practice, they place seemingly artificial restrictions on legal programs and questions, such as disallowing unbounded recursion and allowing only simple equality conditions. We prove it is possible to make trustworthy probabilistic languages for Bayesian practice by using functional programming theory to define them mathematically and prove them correct. The specifications interpret programs using measure-theoretic probability, which is a complete enough theory of probability that we do not need to restrict programs or conditions. We demonstrate that these trustworthy languages are useful by implementing them, and using them to model and answer questions about typical probabilistic processes. We also model and answer questions about processes that are either difficult or impossible to reason about precisely using typical Bayesian mathematical tools.

<p>This thesis presents the design and implementation of a source code generator for dealing with Bayesian statistics. The specific focus of this case study is to produce usable source code for handling Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) from a Domain Specific Language (DSL).</p> <p>Domain specific languages are used to allow domain experts to design their source code from the perspective of the problem domain. The goal of designing in such a way is to increase the development productivity without requiring extensive programming knowledge.</p> / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Goal-Oriented Modelling Languages such as the Goal Requirements Language (GRL) have been used to reason about Design Patterns. However, the GRL is a general purpose modelling language that does not support concepts bespoke to the pattern domain. This thesis has investigated how advanced programming language techniques, namely Dependent Types and Domain Specific Languages, can be used to enhance the design and construction of Domain Specific Modelling languages (DSMLs), and apply the results to Design Pattern Engineering. This thesis presents Sif, a DSML for reasoning about design patterns as goal- oriented requirements problems. Sif presents modellers with a modelling language tailored to the pattern domain but leverages the GRL for realisation of the modelling constructs. Dependent types have influenced the design and implementation of Sif to provide correctness guarantees, and have led to the development of NovoGRL a novel extension of the GRL. A technique for DSML implementation called Types as (Meta) Modellers was developed in which the interpretation between a DSML and its host language is implemented directly within the type-system of the DSML. This provides correctness guarantees of DSML model instances during model construction. Models can only be constructed if and only if the DSML's type-system can build a valid representation of the model in the host language. This thesis also investigated design pattern evaluation, developing PREMES an evaluation framework that uses tailorable testing techniques to provide demonstrable reporting on pattern quality. Linking PREMES with Sif are: Freyja—an active pattern document schema in which Sif models are embedded within pattern documents; and Frigg—a tool for interacting with pattern documents. The proof-of-concept tools in this thesis demonstrate: machine enhanced interactions with design patterns; reproducible automation in the PREMES framework; and machine checking of pattern documents as Sif models. With the tooling and techniques presented, design pattern engineering can become a more rigorous, demonstrable, and machine checkable process.

Les services de téléphonie IP automatisent le traitement des stimuli de communication en utilisant des ressources réseaux. Cependant, l'ajout de services rend vulnérable le système de téléphonie car certaines propriétés de fonctionnement des services déployés ne sont pas garanties. Aucune solution de développement de services ne permet de simultanément garantir des propriétés de fonctionnement et d'exploiter des ressources réseaux. Cette thèse propose une approche fondée sur le concept des langages dédiés pour développer des services de communications. Deux nouveaux langages dédiés au domaine des communications ont été développés : SPL et Pantaxou. Le premier sert à router des messages de signalisation tandis que le second, plus généraliste, permet la coordination d'entités communicantes. Dans cette thèse, nous démontrons, grâce à SPL et Pantaxou, que les services de communications peuvent être développés avec un langage de programmation expressif tout en préservant des propriétés critiques du domaine. / IP telephony services use network resources to automate communication stimuli processing. However, deploying services on a telephony system leads to safety issues and programmers need to ensure some safety properties on their services. Several approaches allowing service development have quickly emerged. However, none of them is both expressive and safe. This thesis proposes a new approach that relies on domain-specific languages (DSL) to develop communication services. Two new DSLs have been designed for communication services, namely SPL (Session Processing Language) and Pantaxou. The first one allows to route signaling messages while the second one, more generalist, enables to define coordination logics of communicating entities. In this thesis, we demonstrate thanks to SPL and Pantaxou that communication services could be developed with an expressive programming language that preserves some critical domain properties.

Business information systems (BIS) comprise technological (e.g. programs), informational (e.g. content) and social artifacts (e.g. collaboration structures). Typically, such systems are constantly and collectively developed (co-developed) further by a variety of individuals within the organization. By recognizing these varying types of actors (concerning their goals, technical expertise and language means) and their predominantly developed artifact type, one can distinguish two types of subsystems: technical subsystems wherein the development of the system behavior is conducted by software developers; and business subsystems dominated by end-users developing informational artifacts. So far, co-development structures within and between these subsystems are not well understood, especially the aspect that - potentially driven by appropriate measures such as the provision of domain-specific languages - co-development might shift between these subsystems. This paper presents an approach for characterizing the co-development of real-world BIS with respect to direct participation from different kinds of contributors. This multilayered approach allows us to analyze the co-development with programming languages, domain-specific languages and end-user tools. The approach is suited to assess the direct participation of individuals from different subsystems in the development of evolving BIS. We focus on the intersection of these subsystems, present appropriate metrics and a multilayered analysis scheme. Contributions to artifacts are analyzed using social network analysis to detect structural properties of continuous co-development. The application to Learn@WU, a real-world BIS, demonstrates how end-user enabling technologies have shifted the co-development effort of the system from a small group of developers to a several orders of magnitude larger group of contributors. We observed an increase of direct participation over time on both informational and executable artifacts, while the number of technical experts was more or less constant. Our approach may act as a trigger for the application and further development of rigorous instruments for assessing co-development of BIS. (authors' abstract)