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Record W4225878264 · doi:10.1109/tse.2022.3162985

Static Profiling of Alloy Models

2022· article· en· W4225878264 on OpenAlex
Elias Eid, Nancy A. Day

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsComputer scienceCorrectnessModeling languageNatural language processingProfiling (computer programming)Matching (statistics)Programming languageSoftwareArtificial intelligenceData scienceSoftware engineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Modeling of software-intensive systems using formal declarative modeling languages offers a means of managing software complexity through the use of abstraction and early identification of correctness issues by formal analysis. Alloy is one such language used for modeling systems early in the development process. Little work has been done to study the styles and techniques commonly used in Alloy models. We present the first static analysis study of Alloy models. We investigate research questions that examine a large corpus of 1,652 Alloy models. To evaluate these research questions, we create a methodology that leverages the power of ANTLR pattern matching and the query language XPath. Our research questions are split into two categories depending on their purpose. The Model Characteristics category aims to identify <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">what</i> language constructs are used commonly. Modeling Practices questions are considerably more complex and identify <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">how</i> modelers are using Alloy's constructs. We also evaluate our research questions on a subset of models from our corpus written by expert modelers. We compare the results of the expert corpus to the results obtained from the general corpus to gain insight into how expert modelers use the Alloy language. We draw conclusions from the findings of our research questions and present actionable items for educators, language and environment designers, and tool developers. Actionable items for educators are intended to highlight underutilized language constructs and features, and help student modelers avoid discouraged practices. Actionable items aimed at language designers present ways to improve the Alloy language by adding constructs or removing unused ones based on trends identified in our corpus of models. The actionable items aimed at environment designers address features to facilitate model creation. Actionable items for tool developers provide suggestions for back-end optimizations.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: Simulation or modeling
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.750
Threshold uncertainty score0.908

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.237
Teacher spread0.216 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it