API caveat explorer - Surfacing negative usages from practice: An API-oriented interactive exploratory search system for programmers

Jing Li, Aixin Sun, Zhenchang Xing, Lei Han

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Application programming interface (API) documentation well describes an API and how to use it. However, official documentation does not describe "how not to use it" or the different kinds of errors when an API is used wrongly. Programming caveats are negative usages of an API. When these caveats are overlooked, errors may emerge, leading to heavy discussions on Q&A websites like Stack Overflow. In this demonstration, we present API Caveat Explorer, a search system to explore API caveats that are mined from large-scale unstructured discussions on Stack Overflow. API Caveat Explorer takes API-oriented queries such as "HashMap" and retrieves API caveats by text summarization techniques. API caveats are represented by sentences, which are context-independent, prominent, semantically diverse and non-redundant. The system provides a web-based interface that allows users to interactively explore the full picture of all discovered caveats of an API, and the details of each. The potential users of API Caveat Explorer are programmers and educators for learning and teaching APIs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1293-1296
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356572
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Jun 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event41st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018 - Ann Arbor, United States
Duration: 8 Jul 201812 Jul 2018

Publication series

Name41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018

Conference

Conference41st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAnn Arbor
Period8/07/1812/07/18

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