Assignment 5

Question #1

In a child language acquisition system, the utterances of a particular child are stored in a textfile, where each line of that file gives the standard written form of a word and the age in days at which the child said that word. The file is not ordered by word or child-age, and the same word may have been said multiple times on different dates.

Write and document a Python script vocProg.py which takes an utterance-file described above as a command-line argument and computes and outputs a list (sorted in increasing chronological order by age) of the sets of words spoken for the first time by the child at each age represented in the file. Note that some ages may have no words that were spoken for the first time at that age. Your script must work on datafiles vocProg1.dat and vocProg2.dat to produce the output given in typescript-file vocProg.script. You may assume that all utterance-file are readable and formatted correctly.

Question #2

In a social group analysis system, the opinions over time held by the members of a group about each other are stored in a textfile, where the first line of this file lists the names of the group members and each subsequent line (in order going forward in time) gives an opinion held by member X about member Y at a particular time, where each opinion is of the form "X likes Y", "X ignores Y", or "X dislikes Y". These opinions are stored in a matrix M such that M[X, Y] is the current opinion held by X about Y, and has value 1, 0, or -1 if X likes, ignores, or dislikes Y, respectively. Initially, all opinions stored in M have value 0; moreover, as opinions change over time, M may become asymmetric, e.g., M[X,Y] need not equal M[Y,X]. The group opinion of individual Y relative to M is the average of all entries of the form M[Z, Y], where Z is any member of the group except Y.

Write and document a Python script socEval.py which, given an opinion file described above as a command-line argument, computes the group-opinion matrix M resulting from the specified sequence of opinions and outputs the final group opinions of all members of the group sorted in reverse order by group opinion value. Your script must work on datafiles socEval1.dat and socEval2.dat to produce the output given in typescript-file socEval.script. You may assume that all opinion files are readable and properly formatted.

Hints

You may find the various example scripts in the course notes of use.

In Question #1, you may find it useful to store word-age items in a dictionary (keyed on age) of sets (of words pronounced at that age).

In Question #2, you may find it useful to store the opinion-matrix as a dictionary (keyed on member-name X) of dictionaries (keyed on member-name Y with item-value M[X,Y]).

Submission

Please hand in printed copies of all of your Python script files. You must also submit these files electronically using the submit-assignment command. Note that each script file must have the following comment block at the top, where the X's are replaced with the appropriate information, followed by a docstring briefly describing the program in that script. For instance, my script for Question #1 of this assignment would begin with the following comment block:

#########################################################
##  CS 2500 (Fall 2008), Assignment #5, Question #1    ##
##   Script File Name: vocProg.py                      ##
##       Student Name: Todd Wareham                    ##
##         Login Name: harold                          ##
##              MUN #: 8008765                         ##
#########################################################

You do not have to develop your code on our CS departmental systems. However, as your code will be compiled and tested on our CS departmental systems as part of the assignment marking process, you should ensure that your code compiles and runs correctly on at least one of these systems.

Additional Notes:

• Oct 10, 2:50pm
  Assignment #5 posted.

Created: October 10, 2008
Last Modified: October 10, 2008