Folk-wisdom in software engineering suggests that small functions that adhere to the principle of single-responsibility have several advantages over longer, monolithic functions, including improvement in code comprehension. Despite this widespread view, ...

Model checking is a formal verification technique that automatically decides whether a software system conforms to its specification or not. One of the important features of model checking is to output a counterexample, if a violative execution is ...

Context: Tabular and graphical representations are used to communicate security risk assessments for IT systems. However, there is no consensus on which type of representation better supports the comprehension of risks (such as the relationships between ...

Most ant colony optimization ACO algorithms for inducing classification rules use a ACO-based procedure to create a rule in a one-at-a-time fashion. An improved search strategy has been proposed in the cAnt-Miner<inline-formula><inline-graphic xlink="...

It is extremely important in many application domains to have transparency in predictive modeling. Domain experts do not tend to prefer "black box" predictive model models. They would like to understand how predictions are made, and possibly, prefer ...

We carried out a family of experiments to investigate whether the use of UML models produced in the requirements analysis process helps in the comprehensibility and modifiability of source code. The family consists of a controlled experiment and 3 ...

Many document classification applications require human understanding of the reasons for data-driven classification decisions by managers, client-facing employees, and the technical team. Predictive models treat documents as data to be classified, and ...

Ensemble Methods represent an important research area within machine learning. Here, we argue that the use of such methods can be generalized and applied in many more situations than they have been previously. Instead of using them only to combine the ...

Language comprehension is an important issue in fire alarm systems. This study focuses on the expression of temporal information in a fire situation. Both absolute time and relative time were designed to compare the expression types of temporal ...

Document comprehensibility is one of key factors determining document quality and, in result, user's satisfaction. Relevant web pages are of little utility if they are incomprehensible or impose too much cognitive burden on readers. Traditional measures ...

Software testing is a crucial activity during software development and fault prediction models assist practitioners herein by providing an upfront identification of faulty software code by drawing upon the machine learning literature. While especially ...

Data mining tools often include a workbench of algorithms to model a given dataset but lack sufficient guidance to select the most accurate algorithm according to the nature of the dataset. The most accurate algorithm is not known in advance and no ...

This paper argues that the best current text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems are approaching the quality necessary to provide effective automated narration of audio books. Currently, nearly all audio books and audio journals are recorded by ...

Obfuscation methods were proposed for protecting programs from cracking. These methods convert program into incomprehensible one, such as change symbol names from meaningful to meaningless. As a result, secret information in the program can be hidden. ...

Intelligent interactive systems (IIS) have great potential to improve users' experience with technology by tailoring their behaviour and appearance to users' individual needs; however, these systems, with their complex algorithms and dynamic behaviour, ...

We put forward a hypothesis that if there is a link from one page to another, it is likely that comprehensibility of the two pages is similar. To investigate whether this hypothesis is true or not, we conduct experiments using existing readability ...

For many important practical applications model transparency is an important requirement. A probabilistic radial basis function (PRBF) network is an effective non-linear classifier, but similarly to most other neural network models it is not ...

The authors investigated the effectiveness of pictograms in manufacturing settings, where supervisors and workers often do not share the same language or cultural background. Pictograms for manufacturing steps, such as 'cut', 'push' and 'measure', were ...

Given a search query, conventional Web search engines provide users with the same ranking although users' comprehension levels can be different. It is often difficult especially for non-expert users to find comprehensible Web pages from the list of ...

Although Web search engines have become information gateways to the Internet, for queries containing technical terms, search results often contain pages that are difficult to be understood by non-expert users. Therefore, re-ranking search results in a ...