Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

1-2020

Abstract

Informal language and the absence of a standard taxonomy for software technologies make it difficult to reliably analyze technology trends on discussion forums and other on-line venues. We propose an automated approach called Witt for the categorization of software technologies (an expanded version of the hypernym discovery problem). Witt takes as input a phrase describing a software technology or concept and returns a general category that describes it (e.g., integrated development environment), along with attributes that further qualify it (commercial, php, etc.). By extension, the approach enables the dynamic creation of lists of all technologies of a given type (e.g., web application frameworks). Our approach relies on Stack Overflow and Wikipedia, and involves numerous original domain adaptations and a new solution to the problem of normalizing automatically-detected hypernyms. We compared Witt with six independent taxonomy tools and found that, when applied to software terms, Witt demonstrated better coverage than all evaluated alternative solutions, without a corresponding degradation in false positive rate.

Keywords

Software, Encyclopedias, Electronic publishing, Internet, Taxonomy, Tools

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Volume

46

Issue

1

First Page

20

Last Page

32

ISSN

0098-5589

Identifier

10.1109/TSE.2018.2836450

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2836450

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