An information retrieval approach for automatically constructing software libraries

Abstract

Although software reuse presents clear advantages for programmer productivit.y and code reliability, it is not practiced enough. One of the reasons for the only moderate success of reuse is the lack of software libr'lries that facilitate the actual locating and understanding of reusable components. This paper dpscrihes II technology for automatically I\Ssembling large softwar~ libraries that promote softwarp rpuse by helping the user locate the components closest to hfO'r/his neeels Softwarp libraries are aut.omatically assemblfO'd from a set. of Ilnorganizpd component.s by using informat.ion rptripval techniques. The constrllction of the library is done in !.wo steps. First, attribut.es ;up alJtornal.ically pxtracted from nat.urlll language docllmpntat.ion by IIsing a npIV inJexing scheme ba~fO'd an t.he nntinns of lexical affinities anci quantity of inforrnllt.ion. Then, a hierarchy for browsing is alJtomat.iclllly generaterl using a clustering techniq1le that draws only nn the informlltion provided by the attribulps. Thanks to the frfO'p-!.pxt inrlexing se-heme, tools following this approach can accept free-style nat'Jral language 'luprips. This tpChllOlogy h1\.S bfO'en impll"ment .. d in the GURU ~ystpm, whirh h<l5 bpen applied 1.0 construct an organized library of Alx utilities. An exppriment. was rondllrtpd in orrlpr to pvalullte the n•t.rievll\ effectivl"nfO'ss of GURU 1\.5 compl\red to INFOExPLORER a hypprt.pxt lihrary syslplll for Alx 3 on the IBM RISe System/6000 series. We followpr\ Ihe usual evaluation prOf"pr\lJr!' us .. .! in informat.ion rptrifO'vl\l, hased upon recall and precision ml"a5IJrPS, and d"t.erminpd t 1111 I. nllr syst.f'Tll pr>rforms l!i% better on a random test set, while being milch le~s pxpensive to build than INFOEXl'LORF.R.

Personalizing Delivered Information in a Software Reuse Environment

“…The retrieval mechanism of CodeBroker is similar to that of those systems using free-text indexing [12]. Many sophisticated retrieval mechanisms have been proposed, such as multifaceted classification, frames and semantic networks, and associative networks [13].…”

Automatic construction of navigable concept networks characterizing text databases

“…For instance, we could use vocabulary normalization tools such as synonym list and thesarus associations, or using adjacent words to form term-phrases (Maarek et al, 1991;Chen et al, 1994). We have to emphasize, however, that it has been often reported that in many practical situations the use of more elaborated systems than single-word term extraction did not result in significant performance improvement (Salton, 1989).…”

“…However, the statistical clustering methods that have predominately been used in information retrieval (e.g., Willet, 1988;Crouch et al, 1989;Maarek et al, 1991) are affected by their inability of producing a conceptual description of the classes generated. By contrast, conceptual clustering techniques usually provide an intensional description of the clusters generated, which may improve both the effectiveness of hierarchy navigation, for interactive searches, and the efficiency of the query-cluster matching process, for automatic searches.…”

“…Most usually, these databases are accessed to retrieve items of interest or to explore their content, therefore it is useful to organize the information into some sort of structure and then let the user navigate through it. In fact, the organizing/navigating paradigm is becoming very popular (Thompson and Croft, 1989;Maarek et al, 1991;Lucarella et al, 1993;Bowman et al, 1994). One main problem of this approach is creating the atomic pieces of information and linking them, which usually requires subjective and time-consuming decisions.…”

Applying information-retrieval methods to software reuse: a case study

“…Only a few prototype tools have been developed to aid matching of requirements (Maarek et al, 1991;Maiden and Sutcliffe, 1991;Cybulski, 2001). Some related tools can help, however.…”