[Context] Open Source Software (OSS) is nowadays used and integrated in most of the commercial products. However, the selection of OSS projects for integration is not a simple process, mainly due to a of lack of clear selection models and lack of information from the OSS portals. [Objective] We investigate the factors and metrics that practitioners currently consider when selecting OSS. We also investigate the source of information and portals that can be used to assess the factors, as well as the possibility to automatically extract such information with APIs. [Method] We elicited the factors and the metrics adopted to assess and compare OSS performing a survey among 23 experienced developers who often integrate OSS in the software they develop. Moreover, we investigated the APIs of the portals adopted to assess OSS extracting information for the most starred 100K projects in GitHub. [Result] We identified a set consisting of 8 main factors and 74 sub-factors, together with 170 related metrics that companies can use to select OSS to be integrated in their software projects. Unexpectedly, only a small part of the factors can be evaluated automatically, and out of 170 metrics, only 40 are available, of which only 22 returned information for all the 100K projects. Therefore, we recommend project maintainers and project repositories to pay attention to provide information for the project they are hosting, so as to increase the likelihood of being adopted [Conclusion] OSS selection can be partially automated, by extracting the information needed for the selection from portal APIs. OSS producers can benefit from our results by checking if they are providing all the information commonly required by potential adopters...
Given its status as a classic problem and its importance to both theoreticians and practitioners, edit distance provides an excellent lens through which to understand how the theoretical analysis of algorithms impacts practical implementations. From an applied perspective, the goals of theoretical analysis are to predict the empirical performance of an algorithm and to serve as a yardstick to design novel algorithms that perform well in practice. In this paper, we systematically survey the types of theoretical analysis techniques that have been applied to edit distance and evaluate the extent to which each one has achieved these two goals. These techniques include traditional worst-case analysis, worst-case analysis parametrized by edit distance or entropy or compressibility, average-case analysis, semi-random models, and advice-based models. We find that the track record is mixed. On one hand, two algorithms widely used in practice have been born out of theoretical analysis and their empirical performance is captured well by theoretical predictions. On the other hand, all the algorithms developed using theoretical analysis as a yardstick since then have not had any practical relevance. We conclude by discussing the remaining open problems and how they can be tackled.
Modern code review is a critical and indispensable practice in a pull-request development paradigm that prevails in Open Source Software (OSS) development. Finding a suitable reviewer in projects with massive participants thus becomes an increasingly challenging task. Many reviewer recommendation approaches (recommenders) have been developed to support this task which apply a similar strategy, i.e. modeling the review history first then followed by predicting/recommending a reviewer based on the model. Apparently, the better the model reflects the reality in review history, the higher recommender's performance we may expect. However, one typical scenario in a pull-request development paradigm, i.e. one Pull-Request (PR) (such as a revision or addition submitted by a contributor) may have multiple reviewers and they may impact each other through publicly posted comments, has not been modeled well in existing recommenders. We adopted the hypergraph technique to model this high-order relationship (i.e. one PR with multiple reviewers herein) and developed a new recommender, namely HGRec, which is evaluated by 12 OSS projects with more than 87K PRs, 680K comments in terms of accuracy and recommendation distribution. The results indicate that HGRec outperforms the state-of-the-art recommenders on recommendation accuracy. Besides, among the top three accurate recommenders, HGRec is more likely to recommend a diversity of reviewers, which can help to relieve the core reviewers' workload congestion issue. Moreover, since HGRec is based on hypergraph, which is a natural and interpretable representation to model review history, it is easy to accommodate more types of entities and realistic relationships in modern code review scenarios. As the first attempt, this study reveals the potentials of hypergraph on advancing the pragmatic solutions for code reviewer recommendation.
Coordinated Multiple views (CMVs) are a visualization technique that simultaneously presents multiple visualizations in separate but linked views. There are many studies that report the advantages (e.g., usefulness for finding hidden relationships) and disadvantages (e.g., cognitive load) of CMVs. But little empirical work exists on the impact of the number of views on visual anlaysis results and processes, which results in uncertainty in the relationship between the view number and visual anlaysis. In this work, we aim at investigating the relationship between the number of coordinated views and users analytic processes and results. To achieve the goal, we implemented a CMV tool for visual anlaysis. We also provided visualization duplication in the tool to help users easily create a desired number of visualization views on-the-fly. We conducted a between-subject study with 44 participants, where we asked participants to solve five analytic problems using the visual tool. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we discovered the positive correlation between the number of views and analytic results. We also found that visualization duplication encourages users to create more views and to take various analysis strategies. Based on the results, we provide implications and limitations of our study.
Common tasks encountered in epidemiology, including disease incidence estimation and causal inference, rely on predictive modeling. Constructing a predictive model can be thought of as learning a prediction function, i.e., a function that takes as input covariate data and outputs a predicted value. Many strategies for learning these functions from data are available, from parametric regressions to machine learning algorithms. It can be challenging to choose an approach, as it is impossible to know in advance which one is the most suitable for a particular dataset and prediction task at hand. The super learner (SL) is an algorithm that alleviates concerns over selecting the one "right" strategy while providing the freedom to consider many of them, such as those recommended by collaborators, used in related research, or specified by subject-matter experts. It is an entirely pre-specified and data-adaptive strategy for predictive modeling. To ensure the SL is well-specified for learning the prediction function, the analyst does need to make a few important choices. In this Education Corner article, we provide step-by-step guidelines for making these choices, walking the reader through each of them and providing intuition along the way. In doing so, we aim to empower the analyst to tailor the SL specification to their prediction task, thereby ensuring their SL performs as well as possible. A flowchart provides a concise, easy-to-follow summary of key suggestions and heuristics, based on our accumulated experience, and guided by theory.
Current practices in metric evaluation focus on one single dataset, e.g., Newstest dataset in each year's WMT Metrics Shared Task. However, in this paper, we qualitatively and quantitatively show that the performances of metrics are sensitive to data. The ranking of metrics varies when the evaluation is conducted on different datasets. Then this paper further investigates two potential hypotheses, i.e., insignificant data points and the deviation of Independent and Identically Distributed (i.i.d) assumption, which may take responsibility for the issue of data variance. In conclusion, our findings suggest that when evaluating automatic translation metrics, researchers should take data variance into account and be cautious to claim the result on a single dataset, because it may leads to inconsistent results with most of other datasets.
Data collection and research methodology represents a critical part of the research pipeline. On the one hand, it is important that we collect data in a way that maximises the validity of what we are measuring, which may involve the use of long scales with many items. On the other hand, collecting a large number of items across multiple scales results in participant fatigue, and expensive and time consuming data collection. It is therefore important that we use the available resources optimally. In this work, we consider how a consideration for theory and the associated causal/structural model can help us to streamline data collection procedures by not wasting time collecting data for variables which are not causally critical for subsequent analysis. This not only saves time and enables us to redirect resources to attend to other variables which are more important, but also increases research transparency and the reliability of theory testing. In order to achieve this streamlined data collection, we leverage structural models, and Markov conditional independency structures implicit in these models to identify the substructures which are critical for answering a particular research question. In this work, we review the relevant concepts and present a number of didactic examples with the hope that psychologists can use these techniques to streamline their data collection process without invalidating the subsequent analysis. We provide a number of simulation results to demonstrate the limited analytical impact of this streamlining.
Modern big data applications usually involve heterogeneous data sources and analytical functions, leading to increasing demand for polystore systems, especially analytical polystore systems. This paper presents AWESOME system along with a domain-specific language ADIL. ADIL is a powerful language which supports 1) native heterogeneous data models such as Corpus, Graph, and Relation; 2) a rich set of analytical functions; and 3) clear and rigorous semantics. AWESOME is an efficient tri-store middle-ware which 1) is built on the top of three heterogeneous DBMSs (Postgres, Solr, and Neo4j) and is easy to be extended to incorporate other systems; 2) supports the in-memory query engines and is equipped with analytical capability; 3) applies a cost model to efficiently execute workloads written in ADIL; 4) fully exploits machine resources to improve scalability. A set of experiments on real workloads demonstrate the capability, efficiency, and scalability of AWESOME.
Cross-Modal Retrieval (CMR) is an important research topic across multimodal computing and information retrieval, which takes one type of data as the query to retrieve relevant data of another type. It has been widely used in many real-world applications. Recently, the vision-language pre-trained models represented by CLIP demonstrate its superiority in learning the visual and textual representations and gain impressive performance on various vision and language related tasks. Although CLIP as well as the previous pre-trained models have shown great performance improvement in the unsupervised CMR, the performance and impact of these pre-trained models on the supervised CMR were rarely explored due to the lack of common representation for the multimodal class-level associations. In this paper, we take CLIP as the current representative vision-language pre-trained model to conduct a comprehensive empirical study. We evaluate its performance and impact on the supervised CMR, and attempt to answer several key research questions. To this end, we first propose a novel model CLIP4CMR (CLIP enhanced network for Cross-Modal Retrieval) that employs the pre-trained CLIP as backbone network to perform the supervised CMR. Then by means of the CLIP4CMR framework, we revisit the design of different learning objectives in current CMR methods to provide new insights on model design. Moreover, we investigate the most concerned aspects in applying CMR, including the robustness to modality imbalance and sensitivity to hyper-parameters, to provide new perspectives for practical applications. Through extensive experiments, we show that CLIP4CMR achieves the SOTA results with prominent improvements on the benchmark datasets, and can be used as a fundamental framework to empirically study the key research issues of the supervised CMR, with significant implications for model design and practical considerations.
Materialized model query aims to find the most appropriate materialized model as the initial model for model reuse. It is the precondition of model reuse, and has recently attracted much attention. Nonetheless, the existing methods suffer from low privacy protection, limited range of applications, and inefficiency since they do not construct a suitable metric to measure the target-related knowledge of materialized models. To address this, we present MMQ, a privacy-protected, general, efficient, and effective materialized model query framework. It uses a Gaussian mixture-based metric called separation degree to rank materialized models. For each materialized model, MMQ first vectorizes the samples in the target dataset into probability vectors by directly applying this model, then utilizes Gaussian distribution to fit for each class of probability vectors, and finally uses separation degree on the Gaussian distributions to measure the target-related knowledge of the materialized model. Moreover, we propose an improved MMQ (I-MMQ), which significantly reduces the query time while retaining the query performance of MMQ. Extensive experiments on a range of practical model reuse workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MMQ.
Although text style transfer has witnessed rapid development in recent years, there is as yet no established standard for evaluation, which is performed using several automatic metrics, lacking the possibility of always resorting to human judgement. We focus on the task of formality transfer, and on the three aspects that are usually evaluated: style strength, content preservation, and fluency. To cast light on how such aspects are assessed by common and new metrics, we run a human-based evaluation and perform a rich correlation analysis. We are then able to offer some recommendations on the use of such metrics in formality transfer, also with an eye to their generalisability (or not) to related tasks.