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Correlation-based software search by leveraging software term database

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Abstract

Internet-scale open source software (OSS) production in various communities generates abundant reusable resources for software developers. However, finding the desired and mature software with keyword queries from a considerable number of candidates, especially for the fresher, is a significant challenge because current search services often fail to understand the semantics of user queries. In this paper, we construct a software term database (STDB) by analyzing tagging data in Stack Overflow and propose a correlation-based software search (CBSS) approach that performs correlation retrieval based on the term relevance obtained from STDB. In addition, we design a novel ranking method to optimize the initial retrieval result. We explore four research questions in four experiments, respectively, to evaluate the effectiveness of the STDB and investigate the performance of the CBSS. The experiment results show that the proposed CBSS can effectively respond to keyword-based software searches and significantly outperforms other existing search services at finding mature software.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61432020, 61303064, 61472430, 61502512) and National Grand R&D Plan (2016YFB1000805).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Zhixing Li, Gang Yin, Tao Wang, Yang Zhang, Yue Yu & Huaimin Wang

Authors
  1. Zhixing Li
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  2. Gang Yin
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  3. Tao Wang
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  4. Yang Zhang
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  5. Yue Yu
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  6. Huaimin Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gang Yin.

Additional information

Zhixing Li received his BS degree in computer science from Chongqing University, China in 2015. He is now an MS candidate in computer science at National University of Defense Technology, China. His research interests include open source software engineering, data mining, and knowledge discovering in open source software.

Gang Yin received his PhD degree in computer science from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China in 2006. He is now an associate professor in NUDT. He has worked in several major research projects including national 973, 863 projects and so on. He has published more than 60 research papers in international conferences and journals. His current research interests include distributed computing, information security, software engineering, and machine learning.

Tao Wang received both his BS and MS degrees in computer science from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China in 2007 and 2010. He is now a PhD candidate in computer science, NUDT. His research interests include open source software engineering, machine learning, data mining, and knowledge discovering in open source software.

Yang Zhang received both his BS and MS degrees in computer science from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China in 2013 and 2015. He is now a PhD candidate in computer science, NUDT. His research interests include open source software engineering, data mining, and social coding networks.

Yue Yu received his PhD degree in computer science from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China in 2016. He is now an associate professor in NUDT. He has visited UC Davis supported by CSC scholarship. His research findings has published on MSR, FSE, IST, ICSME APSEC and SEKE. His current research interests include software engineering, spanning from mining software repositories and analyzing social coding networks.

Huaimin Wang received his PhD degree in computer science from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China in 1992. He is now a professor and chief engineer in Department of Educational Affairs, NUDT. He has been awarded the “Chang Jiang Scholars Program” professor and the Distinct Young Scholar, etc. He has published more than 100 research papers in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals. His current research interests include middleware, software agent, and trustworthy computing.

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Li, Z., Yin, G., Wang, T. et al. Correlation-based software search by leveraging software term database. Front. Comput. Sci. 12, 923–938 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-017-6573-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-017-6573-z

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