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Natural Language-Based Software Analyses and Tools for Software Maintenance

  • Chapter
Software Engineering (ISSSE 2010, ISSSE 2009, ISSSE 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7171))

Abstract

Significant portions of software life cycle resources are devoted to program maintenance, which motivates the development of automated techniques and tools to support the tedious, error-prone tasks. Natural language clues from programmers’ naming in literals, identifiers, and comments can be leveraged to improve the effectiveness of many software tools. For example, they can be used to increase the accuracy of software search tools, improve the ability of program navigation tools to recommend related methods, and raise the accuracy of other program analyses by providing access to natural language information. This chapter focuses on how to capture, model, and apply the programmers’ conceptual knowledge expressed in both linguistic information as well as programming language structure and semantics. We call this kind of analysis Natural Language Program Analysis (NLPA) since it combines natural language processing techniques with program analysis to extract information for analysis of the source program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 19716, USA

    Lori Pollock, K. Vijay-Shanker & Giriprasad Sridhara

  2. Computer Science, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, 07043, USA

    Emily Hill

  3. ABB Inc., US Corporate Research, USA

    David Shepherd

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  1. Lori Pollock
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  2. K. Vijay-Shanker
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  3. Emily Hill
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  4. Giriprasad Sridhara
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  5. David Shepherd
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Software Engineering Lab, University of Salerno, Fisciano, SA, Italy

    Andrea De Lucia

  2. Università di Salerno, Via Ponte don Melillo, 84081, Fisciano, SA, Italy

    Filomena Ferrucci

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Pollock, L., Vijay-Shanker, K., Hill, E., Sridhara, G., Shepherd, D. (2013). Natural Language-Based Software Analyses and Tools for Software Maintenance. In: De Lucia, A., Ferrucci, F. (eds) Software Engineering. ISSSE ISSSE ISSSE 2010 2009 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7171. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36054-1_4

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