App Stores, such as Google Play or the Apple Store, allow users to provide feedback on apps by posting review comments and giving star ratings. These platforms constitute a useful electronic mean in which application developers and users can productively exchange information about apps. Previous research showed that users feedback contains usage scenarios, bug reports and feature requests, that can help app developers to accomplish software maintenance and evolution tasks. However, in the case of the most popular apps, the large amount of received feedback, its unstructured nature and varying quality can make the identification of useful user feedback a very challenging task. In this paper we present a taxonomy to classify app reviews into categories relevant to software maintenance and evolution, as well as an approach that merges three techniques: (1) Natural Language Processing, (2) Text Analysis and (3) Sentiment Analysis to automatically classify app reviews into the proposed categories. We show that the combined use of these techniques allows to achieve better results (a precision of 75% and a recall of 74%) than results obtained using each technique individually (precision of 70% and a recall of 67%).Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-113425 Accepted Version Originally published at: Panichella, Sebastiano; Di Sorbo, Andrea; Guzman, Emitza; Visaggio, Corrado Aaron; Canfora, Gerardo; Gall, Harald (2015). How can I improve my app? Classifying user reviews for software maintenance and evolution. In: ICSME 2015. IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Bremen, 29 September 2015 -1 October 2015.How Can I Improve My App? Classifying User Reviews for Software Maintenance and Evolution S. Panichella * , A. Di Sorbo † , E. Guzman ‡ , C. A.Visaggio † , G. Canfora † and H. C. Gall * * University of Zurich, Switzerland † University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy ‡ Technische Universität München, Garching, Germany panichella@ifi.uzh.ch, disorbo@unisannio.it, emitza.guzman@mytum.de, {visaggio,canfora}@unisannio.it, gall@ifi.uzh.ch Abstract-App Stores, such as Google Play or the Apple Store, allow users to provide feedback on apps by posting review comments and giving star ratings. These platforms constitute a useful electronic mean in which application developers and users can productively exchange information about apps. Previous research showed that users feedback contains usage scenarios, bug reports and feature requests, that can help app developers to accomplish software maintenance and evolution tasks. However, in the case of the most popular apps, the large amount of received feedback, its unstructured nature and varying quality can make the identification of useful user feedback a very challenging task. In this paper we present a taxonomy to classify app reviews into categories relevant to software maintenance and evolution, as well as an approach that merges three techniques: (1) Natural Language Process...

No abstract

No abstract

Written development communication (e.g. mailing lists, issue trackers) constitutes a precious source of information to build recommenders for software engineers, for example aimed at suggesting experts, or at redocumenting existing source code. In this paper we propose a novel, semi-supervised approach named DECA (Development Emails Content Analyzer) that uses Natural Language Parsing to classify the content of development emails according to their purpose (e.g. feature request, opinion asking, problem discovery, solution proposal, information giving etc), identifying email elements that can be used for specific tasks. A study based on data from Qt and Ubuntu, highlights a high precision (90%) and recall (70%) of DECA in classifying email content, outperforming traditional machine learning strategies. Moreover, we successfully used DECA for re-documenting source code of Eclipse and Lucene, improving the recall, while keeping high precision, of a previous approach based on ad-hoc heuristics.

Abstract-With the wide diffusion of smartphones and their usage in a plethora of processes and activities, these devices have been handling an increasing variety of sensitive resources. Attackers are hence producing a large number of malware applications for Android (the most spread mobile platform), often by slightly modifying existing applications, which results in malware being organized in families.Some works in the literature showed that opcodes are informative for detecting malware, not only in the Android platform. In this paper, we investigate if frequencies of ngrams of opcodes are effective in detecting Android malware and if there is some significant malware family for which they are more or less effective. To this end, we designed a method based on state-of-the-art classifiers applied to frequencies of opcodes ngrams. Then, we experimentally evaluated it on a recent dataset composed of 11120 applications, 5560 of which are malware belonging to several different families.Results show that an accuracy of 97% can be obtained on the average, whereas perfect detection rate is achieved for more than one malware family.