Abstract
Feature location has been recognized as one of the most frequent and important activities undertaken by software developers. Aiming at the issue that most existing feature location approaches based on information retrieval are strongly affected by the quality of the documentation of software artifacts, this paper presents an improved IRbased feature location approach by syntactic analysis. In particular, the proposed approach firstly analyzes how terms have been used in the text through syntactic analysis. Then on this basis, the weight of these terms can be adjusted, and the key terms, which are able to describe the behavioral and semantic characteristics of software repositories, can be further extracted. The results of an experimental study conducted on two open source projects show that characterizing the context of software artifacts considering only key terms can effectively eliminate the text noise in software artifacts, and improve the accuracy of IR-based feature location methods.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 115-126 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Journal of Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2016 |
Keywords
- Feature location
- Natural language processing
- Software maintenance
- Syntactic analysis
- Term weighting