An approach to program understanding by natural language understanding

Etzkorn, Letha H.; Bowen, L. L.; Davis, Carl G.

doi:10.1017/s1351324999002120

Cited by 27 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…You can query semantic information about the source code using a query language or draw the graph to find semantic relationships in your program. 1 …”

Section: Querying Semantic Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Static Analysis Based Support for Program Comprehension in Erlang

Tóth¹,

Bozó²,

Kőszegi³

2011

Acta Electrotechnica Et Informatica

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Program comprehension is important process in software maintenance, considering the lifetime of an industrial software. The first task for a developer is to understand the structure and the behaviour of the program without considering the type of the changerefactoring, bugfix -must be performed on the source code. Understanding and debugging the source code is not straightforward in case of a dynamically typed functional programming language, like Erlang. Thus RefactorErl supports code comprehension through a Semantic Query Language that helps the developers to query semantic relationships in their software product.

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“…You can query semantic information about the source code using a query language or draw the graph to find semantic relationships in your program. 1 …”

Section: Querying Semantic Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A number of papers deal with the problem of software evolution [5], but just a few from that with the presence of code comprehension [1].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Static Analysis Based Support for Program Comprehension in Erlang

Tóth¹,

Bozó²,

Kőszegi³

2011

Acta Electrotechnica Et Informatica

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“…We did not employ any heuristics based on common syntax or formats of identifiers such as those recognized by (Etzkorn 1997;Etzkorn and Davis 1997), those of (Caprile and Tonella 1999) or (Lawrie et al 2006). Similarly, we did not employ any heuristics based on common formats or syntax of comments such as those identified by (Etzkorn et al 1999) or (Etzkorn et al 2001). All these are potential future improvements to our tool; however, each such improvement, although presumably increasing accuracy, makes the approach more complicated and heavyweight.…”

Section: Comparing Sequences With Execution Scenario Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So in cases where different forms of a word would be present, our tool would miss them. We feel the problem with the lack of a stemmer is not extremely severe most of the time, because based on prior studies of typical comment syntax (Etzkorn et al 2001(Etzkorn et al , 1999Etzkorn and Davis 1997) most comments are written in present tense, either imperative or indicative mood. Our experience with use cases is that they are also most commonly written in present tense, imperative mood, ''place order,'' ''determine path,'' ''calculate trajectory,'' or in present tense, indicative mood, for example ''system emits audible beep,'' although it might be interesting to further study the format of use cases, and their relation to common comment formats.…”

Section: Summary Of Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to both these enhancement to fix limitations, a stemmer and a thesaurus, another way to handle these situations would be to make use of heuristics based on common identifier and comment formats and syntax earlier identified by (Etzkorn 1997;Etzkorn and Davis 1997;Etzkorn et al 1999Etzkorn et al , 2001Caprile and Tonella 1999)or (Lawrie et al 2006). However, many of these enhancements could potentially hurt the scalability of the tool (for example, a thesaurus might have to be expanded to include new technical words for different software domains), and the use of any of them would make the tool less lightweight and in some cases more difficult to use.…”

Section: Summary Of Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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A lightweight approach to software validation by comparing UML use cases with internal program documentation selected via call graphs

2007

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This research involves a methodology and associated proof of concept tool to partially automate software validation by comparing UML use cases with particular execution scenarios in source code. These execution scenarios are represented as the internal documentation (identifier names and comments) associated with sequences of execution in static call graphs. This methodology has the potential to reduce validation time and associated costs in many organizations, by enabling quick and easy validation of software relative to the use cases that describe the requirements. The proof of concept tool as it currently stands is intended as an aid to an IV&V software engineer, to assist in directing the software validation process. The approach is lightweight and easily implemented.

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Automated classification and retrieval of reusable software components

Yao

Etzkorn

Virani

2008

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

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The authors describe their research which improves software reuse by using an automated approach to semantically search for and retrieve reusable software components in large software component repositories and on the World Wide Web (WWW). Using automation and smart (semantic) techniques, their approach speeds up the search and retrieval of reusable software components, while retaining good accuracy, and therefore improves the affordability of software reuse.A program understanding of software components and natural language understanding of user queries was employed. Then the software component descriptions were compared by matching the resulting semantic representations of the user queries to the semantic representations of the software components to search for software components that best match the user queries.A proof of concept system was developed to test the authors' approach. The results of this proof of concept system were compared to human experts, and statistical analysis was performed on the collected experimental data. The results from these experiments demonstrate that this automated semantic-based approach for software reusable component classification and retrieval is successful when compared to the labor-intensive results from the experts, thus showing that this approach can significantly benefit software reuse classification and retrieval.

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An approach to program understanding by natural language understanding

Abstract: An automated tool to assist in the understandingReports provided by natural language-generation in the PATRicia system are described.

Cited by 27 publications

References 11 publications

Static Analysis Based Support for Program Comprehension in Erlang

Static Analysis Based Support for Program Comprehension in Erlang

A lightweight approach to software validation by comparing UML use cases with internal program documentation selected via call graphs

Automated classification and retrieval of reusable software components

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