TY - GEN
T1 - Concern localization using information retrieval
T2 - 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 2011
AU - Wang, Shaowei
AU - Lo, David
AU - Xing, Zhenchang
AU - Jiang, Lingxiao
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Many software maintenance activities need to find code units (functions, files, etc.) that implement a certain concern (features, bugs, etc.). To facilitate such activities, many approaches have been proposed to automatically link code units with concerns described in natural languages, which are termed as concern localization and often employ Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. There has not been a study that evaluates and compares the effectiveness of latest IR techniques on a large dataset. This study fills this gap by investigating ten IR techniques, some of which are new and have not been used for concern localization, on a Linux kernel dataset. The Linux kernel dataset contains more than 1,500 concerns that are linked to over 85,000 C functions. We have evaluated the effectiveness of the ten techniques on recovering the links between the concerns and the implementing functions and ranked the IR techniques based on their precisions on concern localization.
AB - Many software maintenance activities need to find code units (functions, files, etc.) that implement a certain concern (features, bugs, etc.). To facilitate such activities, many approaches have been proposed to automatically link code units with concerns described in natural languages, which are termed as concern localization and often employ Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. There has not been a study that evaluates and compares the effectiveness of latest IR techniques on a large dataset. This study fills this gap by investigating ten IR techniques, some of which are new and have not been used for concern localization, on a Linux kernel dataset. The Linux kernel dataset contains more than 1,500 concerns that are linked to over 85,000 C functions. We have evaluated the effectiveness of the ten techniques on recovering the links between the concerns and the implementing functions and ranked the IR techniques based on their precisions on concern localization.
KW - Linux kernel
KW - concern localization
KW - information retrieval
KW - mean average precision
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=83455162513&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/WCRE.2011.72
DO - 10.1109/WCRE.2011.72
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9780769545820
T3 - Proceedings - Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE
SP - 92
EP - 96
BT - Proceedings - 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 2011
Y2 - 17 October 2011 through 20 October 2011
ER -