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Learning I/O Variables from Scientific Software’s User Manuals

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Computational Science – ICCS 2022 (ICCS 2022)

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Abstract

Scientific software often involves many input and output variables. Identifying these variables is important for such software engineering tasks as metamorphic testing. To reduce the manual work, we report in this paper our investigation of machine learning algorithms in classifying variables from software’s user manuals. We identify thirteen natural-language features, and use them to develop a multi-layer solution where the first layer distinguishes variables from non-variables and the second layer classifies the variables into input and output types. Our experimental results on three scientific software systems show that random forest and feedforward neural network can be used to best implement the first layer and second layer respectively.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the EPA SWMM team, especially Michelle Simon, for the research collaborations. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, 45221, USA

    Zedong Peng, Sreelekhaa Nagamalli Santhoshkumar & Nan Niu

  2. Oracle America, Inc., Redwood Shores, CA, 94065, USA

    Xuanyi Lin

  3. University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, 32224, USA

    Upulee Kanewala

Authors
  1. Zedong Peng
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  2. Xuanyi Lin
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  3. Sreelekhaa Nagamalli Santhoshkumar
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  4. Nan Niu
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  5. Upulee Kanewala
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nan Niu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Brunel University London, London, UK

    Derek Groen

  2. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Clélia de Mulatier

  3. AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland

    Maciej Paszynski

  4. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Valeria V. Krzhizhanovskaya

  5. University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Jack J. Dongarra

  6. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter M. A. Sloot

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Peng, Z., Lin, X., Santhoshkumar, S.N., Niu, N., Kanewala, U. (2022). Learning I/O Variables from Scientific Software’s User Manuals. In: Groen, D., de Mulatier, C., Paszynski, M., Krzhizhanovskaya, V.V., Dongarra, J.J., Sloot, P.M.A. (eds) Computational Science – ICCS 2022. ICCS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13353. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08760-8_42

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08760-8_42

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