Sally McClean

Radowanul Haque, Aftab Ali, Sally McClean et al.

Detecting security vulnerabilities in source code remains challenging, particularly due to class imbalance in real-world datasets where vulnerable functions are under-represented. Existing learning-based methods often optimise for recall, leading to high false positive rates and reduced usability in development workflows. Furthermore, many approaches lack explainability, limiting their integration into security workflows. This paper presents ExplainVulD, a graph-based framework for vulnerability detection in C/C++ code. The method constructs Code Property Graphs and represents nodes using dual-channel embeddings that capture both semantic and structural information. These are processed by an edge-aware attention mechanism that incorporates edge-type embeddings to distinguish among program relations. To address class imbalance, the model is trained using class-weighted cross-entropy loss. ExplainVulD achieves a mean accuracy of 88.25 percent and an F1 score of 48.23 percent across 30 independent runs on the ReVeal dataset. These results represent relative improvements of 4.6 percent in accuracy and 16.9 percent in F1 score compared to the ReVeal model, a prior learning-based method. The framework also outperforms static analysis tools, with relative gains of 14.0 to 14.1 percent in accuracy and 132.2 to 201.2 percent in F1 score. Beyond improved detection performance, ExplainVulD produces explainable outputs by identifying the most influential code regions within each function, supporting transparency and trust in security triage.

Gabriel R. Palma, Sally McClean, Brahim Allan et al.

TV customers today face many choices from many live channels and on-demand services. Providing a personalised experience that saves customers time when discovering content is essential for TV providers. However, a reliable understanding of their behaviour and preferences is key. When creating personalised recommendations for TV, the biggest challenge is understanding viewing behaviour within households when multiple people are watching. The objective is to detect and combine individual profiles to make better-personalised recommendations for group viewing. Our challenge is that we have little explicit information about who is watching the devices at any time (individuals or groups). Also, we do not have a way to combine more than one individual profile to make better recommendations for group viewing. We propose a novel framework using a Gaussian mixture model averaging to obtain point estimates for the number of household TV profiles and a Bayesian random walk model to introduce uncertainty. We applied our approach using data from real customers whose TV-watching data totalled approximately half a million observations. Our results indicate that combining our framework with the selected features provides a means to estimate the number of household TV profiles and their characteristics, including shifts over time and quantification of uncertainty.

Isaac K. E. Ampomah, Sally McClean, Zhiwei Lin et al.

Recent studies have shown that neural models can achieve high performance on several sequence labelling/tagging problems without the explicit use of linguistic features such as part-of-speech (POS) tags. These models are trained only using the character-level and the word embedding vectors as inputs. Others have shown that linguistic features can improve the performance of neural models on tasks such as chunking and named entity recognition (NER). However, the change in performance depends on the degree of semantic relatedness between the linguistic features and the target task; in some instances, linguistic features can have a negative impact on performance. This paper presents an approach to jointly learn these linguistic features along with the target sequence labelling tasks with a new multi-task learning (MTL) framework called Gated Tasks Interaction (GTI) network for solving multiple sequence tagging tasks. The GTI network exploits the relations between the multiple tasks via neural gate modules. These gate modules control the flow of information between the different tasks. Experiments on benchmark datasets for chunking and NER show that our framework outperforms other competitive baselines trained with and without external training resources.

Zhengui Xue, Zhiwei Lin, Hui Wang et al.

Rankings, representing preferences over a set of candidates, are widely used in many information systems, e.g., group decision making and information retrieval. It is of great importance to evaluate the consensus of the obtained rankings from multiple agents. An overall measure of the consensus degree provides an insight into the ranking data. Moreover, it could provide a quantitative indicator for consensus comparison between groups and further improvement of a ranking system. Existing studies are insufficient in assessing the overall consensus of a ranking set. They did not provide an evaluation of the consensus degree of preference patterns in most rankings. In this paper, a novel consensus quantifying approach, without the need for any correlation or distance functions as in existing studies of consensus, is proposed based on a concept of q-support patterns of rankings. The q-support patterns represent the commonality embedded in a set of rankings. A method for detecting outliers in a set of rankings is naturally derived from the proposed consensus quantifying approach. Experimental studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.