Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2021

Abstract

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular venues for developers to find answers to their API-related questions. However, API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow are often ambiguous and thus it could be difficult to find the APIs and learn their usages. Disambiguating these API mentions is not trivial, as an API mention can match with names of APIs from different libraries or even the same one. In this paper, we propose an approach called DATYS to disambiguate API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow using type scoping. With type scoping, we consider API methods whose type (i.e. class or interface) appear in more parts (i.e., scopes) of a Stack Overflow thread as more likely to be the API method that the mention refers to. We have evaluated our approach on a dataset of 807 API mentions from 380 threads containing discussions of API methods from four popular third-party Java libraries. Our experiment shows that our approach beats the state-of-the-art by 42.86% in terms of F1-score.

Keywords

API linking, mining, disambiguation

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization; Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

37th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2021)

First Page

679

Last Page

683

ISBN

9781665428828

Identifier

10.1109/ICSME52107.2021.00080

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Luxembourg

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