Chen Yang

Zengyang Li, Xiaoxiao Qi, Qinyi Yu et al.

Modern software systems, such as Spark, are usually written in multiple programming languages (PLs). Besides benefiting from code reuse, such systems can also take advantages of specific PLs to implement certain features, to meet various quality needs, and to improve development efficiency. In this context, a change to such systems may need to modify source files written in different PLs. We define a multi-programming-language commit (MPLC) in a version control system (e.g., Git) as a commit that involves modified source files written in two or more PLs. To our knowledge, the phenomenon of MPLCs in software development has not been explored yet. In light of the potential impact of MPLCs on development difficulty and software quality, we performed an empirical study to understand the state of MPLCs, their change complexity, as well as their impact on open time of issues and bug proneness of source files in real-life software projects. By exploring the MPLCs in 20 non-trivial Apache projects with 205,994 commits, we obtained the following findings: (1) 9% of the commits from all the projects are MPLCs, and the proportion of MPLCs in 80% of the projects goes to a relatively stable level; (2) more than 90% of the MPLCs from all the projects involve source files written in two PLs; (3) the change complexity of MPLCs is significantly higher than that of non-MPLCs in all projects; (4) issues fixed in MPLCs take significantly longer to be resolved than issues fixed in non-MPLCs in 80% of the projects; and (5) source files that have been modified in MPLCs tend to be more bug-prone than source files that have never been modified in MPLCs. These findings provide practitioners with useful insights on the architecture design and quality management of software systems written in multiple PLs.

Chen Yang

Sentence semantic understanding is a key topic in the field of natural language processing. Recently, contextualized word representations derived from pre-trained language models such as ELMO and BERT have shown significant improvements for a wide range of semantic tasks, e.g. question answering, text classification and sentiment analysis. However, how to add external knowledge to further improve the semantic modeling capability of model is worth probing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to combining syntax information with a pre-trained language model. In order to evaluate the effect of the pre-training model, first, we introduce RNN-based and Transformer-based pre-trained language models; secondly, to better integrate external knowledge, such as syntactic information integrate with the pre-training model, we propose a dependency syntax expansion (DSE) model. For evaluation, we have selected two subtasks: sentence completion task and biological relation extraction task. The experimental results show that our model achieves 91.2\% accuracy, outperforming the baseline model by 37.8\% on sentence completion task. And it also gets competitive performance by 75.1\% $F_{1}$ score on relation extraction task.