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Change in language use is driven by cultural forces; it is unclear whether that extends to programming languages. They are designed to be used by humans, but interaction with computer hardware rather than a human audience may limit…

Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It aims at automatically predicting the next tokens or lines that the programmers tend to use. A good code completion tool can…

Strategy languages enable programmers to compose rewrite rules into strategies and control their application. This is useful in programming languages, e.g., for describing program transformations compositionally, but also in automated…

This article presents a novel framework to provide Formal Languages and Automata Theory students design support for the development of regular expressions. This framework includes a design recipe for regular expressions and a customized…

Context] Problems in Requirements Engineering (RE) can lead to serious consequences during the software development lifecycle. [Goal] The goal of this paper is to propose empirically-based guidelines that can be used by different types of…

Many academic journals ask their authors to provide a list of about five to fifteen keywords, to appear on the first page of each article. Since these key words are often phrases of two or more words, we prefer to call them keyphrases.…

Regular expression (RE) matching is a very common functionality that scans a text to find occurrences of patterns specified by an RE; it includes the simpler function of RE recognition. Here we address RE parsing, which subsumes matching by…

Large language models (LLMs) show strong performance across natural language processing (NLP), mathematical reasoning, and programming, and recent large reasoning models (LRMs) further emphasize explicit reasoning. Yet their computational…

The work presented in this thesis seeks to improve programmer productivity in the following ways: - by reducing the amount of code that has to be written to construct an application; - by increasing the reliability of the code written; and…

Coding standards and good practices are fundamental to a disciplined approach to software projects, whatever programming languages they employ. Prolog programming can benefit from such an approach, perhaps more than programming in other…

Secure coding is a critical yet often overlooked practice in software development. Despite extensive awareness efforts, real-world adoption remains inconsistent due to organizational, educational, and technical barriers. This paper provides…

Learning effective representations of source code is critical for any Machine Learning for Software Engineering (ML4SE) system. Inspired by natural language processing, large language models (LLMs) like Codex and CodeGen treat code as…

Developing models that can automatically generate detailed code explanation can greatly benefit software maintenance and programming education. However, existing code-to-text generation models often produce only high-level summaries of code…

Recent advances in coding agents have shown remarkable progress in software issue resolution. In practice, real-world issues are typically bug fixes or feature requests in which human developers naturally incorporate refactoring as part of…

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the initial step towards building a software system. The success or failure of a software project is firmly tied to this phase, based on communication among stakeholders using natural language. The problem…

Code-related benchmarks play a critical role in evaluating large language models (LLMs), yet their quality fundamentally shapes how the community interprets model capabilities. In the past few years, awareness of benchmark quality has…

Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for better…

Program synthesis techniques construct or infer programs from user-provided specifications, such as input-output examples. Yet most specifications, especially those given by end-users, leave the synthesis problem radically ill-posed,…

A software release note is one of the essential documents in the software development life cycle. The software release contains a set of information, e.g., bug fixes and security fixes. Release notes are used in different phases, e.g.,…

Given the complexity of modern software systems, it is of great importance that such systems be able to autonomously modify themselves, i.e., self-adapt, with minimal human supervision. It is critical that this adaptation both results in…