Hasil untuk "African languages and literature"

Muyukani Kizito

We present \textbf{Turn}, a compiled, actor-based programming language -- statically typed for schema inference, dynamically typed at the value level -- for agentic software: programs that reason and act autonomously by delegating inference to large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches augment general-purpose languages with frameworks, encoding critical invariants (bounded context, typed inference output, credential isolation, durable state) as application-level conventions rather than language guarantees. Turn introduces five language-level constructs that address this gap. \emph{Cognitive Type Safety} makes LLM inference a typed primitive: the compiler generates a JSON Schema from a struct definition and the VM validates model output before binding. The \emph{confidence operator} enables deterministic control flow gated on model certainty. Turn's \emph{actor-based process model}, derived from Erlang, gives each agent an isolated context window, persistent memory, and mailbox. A \emph{capability-based identity system} returns opaque, unforgeable handles from the VM host, ensuring raw credentials never enter agent memory. Finally, \emph{compile-time schema absorption} (\texttt{use schema::<protocol>}) synthesizes typed API bindings from external specifications at compile time; the \texttt{openapi} adapter is shipped with \texttt{graphql}, \texttt{fhir}, and \texttt{mcp} in active development. We describe the language design, type rules, schema semantics, and a Rust-based bytecode VM, and evaluate Turn against representative agentic workloads. Turn is open source at https://github.com/ekizito96/Turn.

Katarzyna Więckowska

In this article, I analyse the movement of human and nonhuman bodies in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021). I argue that the depiction of the environmental and social damage caused by oil extraction in the novel resists the dominant discourse of the Anthropocene by refusing to universalise the threats produced by ecological crisis, embedding environmental vulnerability within histories of colonial violence and forced displacement and particularising the bodies that bear the cost of disasters. My reading of toxicity, the flow of capital, and networks of power demonstrates how agency is shaped by mobility, immobility, and attachment to place and points to the possibilities of resistance and change outlined in the book. How Beautiful We Were deploys multiple narrators and adopts an innovative way of telling the community’s story to convey the multigenerational and ongoing nature of postcolonial trauma. I argue that the use of petro-magic-realism and we-narrative makes the novel an example of collective climate witnessing and provides a means to combat environmental forgetting. Although the shift from forced immobility to forced mobility depicted in Mbue’s book may point to dark times ahead, I propose to interpret the focus on children as allowing for imagining the future as a time of positive transformation. 

Mark Koch, Alan Lawrence, Kartik Singhal et al.

We present ongoing work on Guppy, a domain-specific language embedded in Python that allows users to write high-level hybrid quantum programs with complex control flow in Pythonic syntax, aiming to run them on actual quantum hardware.

David van Balen, Tiziano De Matteis, Clemens Grelck et al.

Parallel functional array languages are an emerging class of programming languages that promise to combine low-effort parallel programming with good performance and performance portability. We systematically compare the designs and implementations of five different functional array languages: Accelerate, APL, DaCe, Futhark, and SaC. We demonstrate the expressiveness of functional array programming by means of four challenging benchmarks, namely N-body simulation, MultiGrid, Quickhull, and Flash Attention. These benchmarks represent a range of application domains and parallel computational models. We argue that the functional array code is much shorter and more comprehensible than the hand-optimized baseline implementations because it omits architecture-specific aspects. Instead, the language implementations generate both multicore and GPU executables from a single source code base. Hence, we further argue that functional array code could more easily be ported to, and optimized for, new parallel architectures than conventional implementations of numerical kernels. We demonstrate this potential by reporting the performance of the five parallel functional array languages on a total of 39 instances of the four benchmarks on both a 32-core AMD EPYC 7313 multicore system and on an NVIDIA A30 GPU. We explore in-depth why each language performs well or not so well on each benchmark and architecture. We argue that the results demonstrate that mature functional array languages have the potential to deliver performance competitive with the best available conventional techniques.

Violet Szabo, Dominik Winterer, Zhendong Su

Today's programmers can choose from an exceptional range of programming languages, each with its own traits, purpose, and complexity. A key aspect of a language's complexity is how hard it is to compile programs in the language. While most programmers have an intuition about compilation hardness for different programming languages, no metric exists to quantify it. We introduce the compilation quotient (CQ), a metric to quantify the compilation hardness of compiled programming languages. The key idea is to measure the compilation success rates of programs sampled from context-free grammars. To this end, we fairly sample over 12 million programs in total. CQ ranges between 0 and 100, where 0 indicates that no programs compile, and 100 means that all programs compile. Our findings on 12 popular compiled programming languages show high variation in CQ. C has a CQ of 48.11, C++ has 0.60, Java has 0.27 and Haskell has 0.13. Strikingly, Rust's CQ is nearly 0, and for C, even a large fraction of very sizable programs compile. We believe CQ can help understand the differences of compiled programming languages better and help language designers.

Federico Mora, Justin Wong, Haley Lepe et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) for code applications have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot fluency and instruction following on challenging code related tasks ranging from test case generation to self-repair. Unsurprisingly, however, models struggle to compose syntactically valid programs in programming languages unrepresented in pre-training, referred to as very low-resource Programming Languages (VLPLs). VLPLs appear in crucial settings, including domain-specific languages for internal tools, tool-chains for legacy languages, and formal verification frameworks. Inspired by a technique called natural programming elicitation, we propose designing an intermediate language that LLMs "naturally" know how to use and which can be automatically compiled to a target VLPL. When LLMs generate code that lies outside of this intermediate language, we use compiler techniques to repair the code into programs in the intermediate language. Overall, we introduce \emph{synthetic programming elicitation and compilation} (SPEAC), an approach that enables LLMs to generate syntactically valid code even for VLPLs. We empirically evaluate the performance of SPEAC in a case study for the UCLID5 formal verification language and find that, compared to existing retrieval and fine-tuning baselines, SPEAC produces syntactically correct programs more frequently and without sacrificing semantic correctness.

Marta Florido-Llinàs, Álvaro M. Alhambra, David Pérez-García et al.

We introduce regular language states, a family of quantum many-body states. They are built from a special class of formal languages, called regular, which has been thoroughly studied in the field of computer science. They can be understood as the superposition of all the words in a regular language and encompass physically relevant states such as the GHZ-, W- or Dicke-states. By leveraging the theory of regular languages, we develop a theoretical framework to describe them. First, we express them in terms of matrix product states, providing efficient criteria to recognize them. We then develop a canonical form which allows us to formulate a fundamental theorem for the equivalence of regular language states, including under local unitary operations. We also exploit the theory of tensor networks to find an efficient criterion to determine when regular languages are shift-invariant.

César Quilodrán-Casas, Christopher Waite, Nicole Alhadeff et al.

Climate change poses an urgent global threat, needing the rapid identification and deployment of innovative solutions. We hypothesise that many of these solutions already exist within scientific literature but remain underutilised. To address this gap, this study employs a curated dataset sourced from OpenAlex, a comprehensive repository of scientific papers. Utilising Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT4-o from OpenAI, we evaluate title-abstract pairs from scientific papers on seven dimensions, covering climate change mitigation potential, stage of technological development, and readiness for deployment. The outputs of the language models are then compared with human evaluations to assess their effectiveness in identifying promising yet overlooked climate innovations. Our findings suggest that these LLM-based models can effectively augment human expertise, uncovering climate solutions that are potentially impactful but with far greater speed, throughput and consistency. Here, we focused on UK-based solutions, but the workflow is region-agnostic. This work contributes to the discovery of neglected innovations in scientific literature and demonstrates the potential of AI in enhancing climate action strategies.

Gabriele Gullà

Following a seminar the present author gave to an Automata Theory course to computer science students, it will be presented, in a very synthetic and mostly selfcontained way, the principal properties of context free languages (CFL), with particular attention given to the Pumping Lemma (PL), and of grammars which generate them(CFG). We refer to Chomsky and Schutzenberger for the first works about it. What is known in literature as the Iteration Theorem here will be referred to as the Ogden's Lemma in a fully justified way. All definitions not strictly connected with the notion of context freeness will be omitted (we will give precise references for all of them). The symbology used is substantially the classical one, but we will replace some symbols to avoid confusion with those used in logic

N. W. Thiong’o

Marcus Edwards

IBM has developed a quantum assembly (QASM) language particular to gate model quantum computing since 2017 [CBSG17]. Version 3.0 which adds timing, pulse control, and gate modifiers is currently undergoing finalization in 2023 [CJA+21]. In a similar vein, Pakin of Los Alamos National Laboratory published a quantum macro assembler (QMASM) for D-Wave quantum annealers in 2016 [Pak16]. This assembler specifically targets quantum annealers like D-Wave's. A comparable technology that targets continuous-variable (CV) quantum computing is the Blackbird language developed by Xanadu since 2018 [KIQ+19]. We implement parsers for each of these languages in TypeScript with a singular approach. In the cases of Blackbird and QMASM these are the first parser implementations that are web compatible and so bring these languages to a new audience and to new runtimes. This makes the parsing and execution of QMASM, QASM and Blackbird possible in web and mobile environments that don't have access to heavy compile toolchains, enabling adoption and scientific research.

Olusegun Olu-Osayomi, Babatunde Adebua

The relevance of indigenous literature (by this is meant African literature) as an important resource for the interrogation and understanding of the social construction of the body, illness, or well-being in the African context seems not to be of primary interest to most African researchers in the field of sociology of health. In this article we explore how the notion of Sanponna (the smallpox deity) depicted in Femi Osofisan’s play Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels can be integrated into disability and indigenous health systems in a way that acknowledges both the biological and social facts as well as how this experience can be interrogated within the domain of epistemological, ontological, and moral foundations and concerns. We rely on mythological and analytical approaches as the theoretical underpinning. We begin with a brief explanation of the concept and potential of Sanponna in Yoruba metaphysics. We also look for relationships between moral values and other socio-psychological dimensions and traditional understandings of disability. Thereafter, we briefly examine Orisa Sanponna and its possible impacts on characters and disability in Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels and conclude with an explanation of the relevance of the themes explored by Osofisan in the play to the Nigerian contemporary experience and situation.

Joel D. Day, Vijay Ganesh, Nathan Grewal et al.

We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly pushdown, and deterministic context-free languages. In total, we consider 20 distinct theories and decidability questions for problems such as emptiness and universality for formal languages over them. First, we discuss their relative expressive power and observe a rough division into two hierarchies based on whether or not word equations are present. Second, we consider the decidability status of several important decision problems, such as emptiness and universality. Note that the emptiness problem is equivalent to the satisfiability problem over the corresponding theory. Third, we consider the problem of whether a language in one theory is expressible in another and show several negative results in which this problem is undecidable. These results are particularly relevant in the context of normal forms in both practical and theoretical aspects of string solving.

Michael Innes

In machine learning (ML), researchers and engineers seem to be at odds. System implementers would prefer models to be declarative, with detailed type information and semantic restrictions that allow models to be optimised, rearranged and parallelised. Yet practitioners show an overwhelming preference for dynamic, imperative languages with mutable state, and much engineering effort is spent bridging the resulting semantic divide. Is there a fundamental conflict? This article explores why imperative and functional styles are used, and how future language designs might get the best of both worlds.

M. Poo

In this paper, illustrative excerpts from mathematics lessons are analysed to examine mathematical and multilingual moves between representations within Sepedi and English medium classrooms. Duval’s theory of representational registers and the literature on multilingual practices help foreground similarities within and differences between the instructional practices of four teachers—two teaching in the medium of Sepedi and two in English—as they move between mathematical and multilingual representations in the teaching of numbers. The findings show patterned differences on the basis of the medium of instruction, with the Sepedi medium instruction indicating, primarily, ‘restatement’ moves between the oral and the symbolic modes of representation, whilst the English medium instruction incorporated a higher incidence of mathematical moves between oral, concrete, iconic and symbolic number-based modes of representation. The evidence of broader use of mathematical representational moves as observed in the English medium lessons offers insights into how and, perhaps, why learners’ knowledge development and understanding of early number in English medium classrooms may emerge in ways that are different from the knowledge developed in the Sepedi medium classes. These patterned differences are important to understand in a South African context where language of instruction continues to be associated with differences in mathematical outcomes in ways that, as previously documented, relate to socio-economic disadvantage.

Shawna-Leze Meiring

Sophia Taleghani, D. Joseph-Davey, S. West et al.

Sylvia Croese

Evan C. Rothera

Review Essay Sharla M. Fett. 2017. Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 312 pp. Lisa A. Lindsay. 2017. Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth Century Odyssey from America to Africa. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 328 pp.

H. P. Grebe