Rice is the staple food for approximately half of the world’s population. Seed vigour has a crucial impact on the yield, which can be evaluated by germination rate, vigor index and etc. Existing seed vigour testing methods heavily rely on manual inspections that are destructive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. To address the drawbacks of existing rice seed vigour testing, we proposed a multispectral image-based non-destructive seed germination testing approach. Specifically, we collected multispectral data in 19 wavebands for six rice varieties. Furthermore, we designed an end-to-end pipeline, denoted as MsiFormer (MisFormer cod3e will be available at https://github.com/LiaoYun0x0/MisFormer) by integrating a Yolo-based object detector (trained Yolo v5) and a vision transformer-based vigour testing model, which effectively improved the automation and efficiency of existing techniques. In order to objectively evaluate the performance of the proposed method in this paper, we conduct a comparison between MisFormer and other 3 deep learning methods. The results showed that, MisFormer performed much better with the accuracy of 94.17%, which was 2.5%-18.34% higher than the other 3 deep learning methods. Besides MsiFormer, possibilities of CIELab mediated image analysis of TTC (tetrazolium chloride) staining in rice seed viability and nCDA (normalized canonical discriminant analysis) in rice seed vigour were also discussed, where CIELab L^* of TTC staining were negatively correlated with vigor index and germination rate, with Pearson’s correlation coefficient of -0.9874, -0.9802 respectively, and CIELab A^* of TTC staining were and positively correlated with vigor index and germination rate, with Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.9624, 0.9544 respectively, and CIELab A^* of nCDA had Pearson’s correlation coefficient of -0.8866 and -0.9340 with vigor index and germination rate, respectively. Besides testing methods, vigour results within and among variety(ies) showed that, there were great variations among the 6 rice varieties, and mean coefficient of variation (CV) of vigor index of individual seed within a variety reached 64.87%, revealing the high risk of conventional methods in random sampling. Vigour variations had close relationship with wavelengths of 780 nm-970 nm, indicating their value in future research.

The paper presents an approach to combine multiple existing information retrieval (IR) techniques to support change impact analysis, which seeks to identify the possible outcomes of a change or determine the necessary modifications for affecting a desired change. The approach integrates a bag-of-words based IR technique, where each class or method is abstracted as a set of words, and a neural network based IR technique to derive conceptual couplings from the source code of a software system. We report rigorous empirical assessments of the changes of three open source systems: jEdit, muCommander, and JabRef. The impact sets obtained are evaluated at the method level of granularity, and the results show that our integrated approach provides statistically significant improvements in accuracy across several cut points relative to the accuracies provided by the individual methods employed independently. Improvements in F-score values of up to 7.3%, 10.9%, and 17.3% are obtained over a baseline technique for jEdit, muCommander, and JabRef, respectively.

Software knowledge community contains a large scale of software knowledge entities with complex structure and rich semantic relations. Semantic relation extraction of software knowledge entities is a critical task for software knowledge graph construction, which has an important impact on knowledge graph based tasks such as software document generation and software expert recommendation. Due to the problems of entity sparsity, relation ambiguity, and the lack of annotated dataset in user-generated content of software knowledge community, it is difficult to apply existing methods of relation extraction in the software knowledge domain. To address these issues, we propose a novel software knowledge entity relation extraction model which incorporates entity-aware information with syntactic dependency information. Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) are used to learn the features of contextual semantic representation and syntactic dependency representation, respectively. To obtain more syntactic dependency information, a weight graph convolutional network based on Newtons cooling law is constructed by calculating a weight adjacency matrix. Specifically, an entity-aware attention mechanism is proposed to integrate the entity information and syntactic dependency information to improve the prediction performance of the model. Experiments are conducted on a dataset which is constructed based on texts of the StackOverflow and show that the proposed model has better performance than the benchmark models.

An important application of information retrieval technology is software change impact analysis. Existing information retrieval-based change impact analysis methods select a single method to transform the source code corpus into vectors in a process known as indexing. The single method is chosen from two primary methods, known as the bag-of-words and word embedding models, each having their specific advantages and disadvantages. The bag-of-words model records every word in the source code but ignores contextual information in the corpus. The word embedding model records the contextual information but loses detail for individual words. To address this problem, we propose a structure-driven method for information retrieval-based change impact analysis (named SDM-CIA). SDM-CIA integrates the bag-of-words and word embedding models based on the software’s structure. Our experiments using a standard benchmark shows that when compared with the existing methods, SDM-CIA improves on precision performance, recall performance, F-score performance, and MRR performance by an average of 3.65%, 3.82%, 3.6%, and 10.28%, respectively. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of SDM-CIA.