DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
Developing Natural Language-based Software Analyses &
Tools to Expedite Software Maintenance
Lori Pollock
Computer and Information Sciences
University of Delaware
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
3:00pm Rm 110 Purdy-Kresge Library
Abstract:
Significant portions of software life cycle resources are devoted to program maintenance,
motivating the development of automated techniques and tools for supporting the tedious, errorprone tasks. In our research, we have observed strong indicators that there are many natural
language clues in program literals, identifiers, and comments that could be leveraged to increase
the effectiveness of many software tools. We have been developing techniques to extract and
utilize natural language clues from code. These clues can be used to increase the accuracy of
software search tools, increase the ability of program navigation tools to recommend related
methods, and increase the accuracy of other program analyses by providing access to natural
language information. We are focusing on specializing information retrieval techniques and natural
language analyses for software so that software maintenance tools can take full advantage of the
valuable information in program identifiers, and integrating these techniques into software tools to
expedite the maintenance activities of program exploration and concern location. This talk will
present an overview of our work - the problems we are solving, the strategies we have been taking,
and the results from various evaluation studies.
Biography:
Lori Pollock is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the
University of Delaware. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science at the University of
Pittsburgh in 1986 and 1983, respectively, and her B.S. in Computer Science and Economics at
Allegheny College in 1981.
Her research focuses on program analysis for optimizing compilers, software testing, mobile code
integrity, aspect-oriented programming, and parallel and distributed systems. Her research has
been continuously supported through the years by numerous grants from the National Science
Foundation and the Army Research Laboratory. She regularly serves as a program committee
member and reviewer for the major conferences and journals in software engineering, programming
language design and implementation, and high performance computing. She served on the
executive committee and as an officer of ACM SIGPLAN for several terms.
Lori Pollock has actively worked for improving the participation of women in computer science for
many years. She was awarded the University of Delaware's E. A. Trabant Award for Women's
Equity in 2004. She is currently a Co-Chair of the Computing Research Association's Committee on
the Status of Women in Computing (CRA-W), and Associate Editor for ACM TOSEM.
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