At first I was taken off guard by the concept of NLPA. I kept thinking, what in the world does NLPA
have to do with researching software maintenance! Little did I know it is a
vital process of analyzing code to make locating program errors easier to
find and understand.
I am very glad that everything worked out this way! It has been a great adventure
seeing how interrelated different concepts and methods in computer science can
be! This summer I am going to be researching a subgroup of the overall application of
the natural language program analysis to computer programming. The portion I
will focus on is stop words. Stop words means exactly what it says, it is
words found in a computer program that are the most relevant for navigating and
tracking its identifiers. Since in programming we use a
lot of nouns for creating objects, methods, etcetera, those words are the
main focus of our natural language program analysis(NPLA) project. We will be
looking at the frequency of words to gain better efficiency of how the program
will detect these stop words and the relationships that may be synonymous in the
English language, but not in computer programming.
Needless to say I am really excited about this research and have even been
formulating my own ideas and other ideas on NLPA that I could possibly use for
future research...who knows maybe as a thesis in graduate school!
My goal is to build on the foundation already started by previous researchers
and current graduate students here at the University of Delaware. I want to
contribute something meaningful that will benefit succeeding researchers who will continue
work on this project in the future.
Other personal goals I hope to reach are efficiently implementing and utilzing the Eclipse program and
plug-ins, and finding other programs to test NLPA's efficiency given different
programs. Finally, I want to get a better idea of the different information
retrieval processes that can be used to improve the overall performance of
the NLPA.
It is possible that I will not get to accomplish each of these! However, this
is the direction I am working towards! All great accomplishments start out
small, and even if I only get to complete one of these goals, that is a closer
step to gaining efficiency in our NLPA research.I am very determined and
already intrigued by several processes I have seen, and will keep you all
updated through my online project journal (My
Journey)! So feel free to join me on this
exciting journey through the challenges and excitements of NLPA!