Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

11-2020

Abstract

Due to the lexical gap between functionality descriptions and user queries, documentation-based API retrieval often produces poor results. Verb phrases and their phrase patterns are essential in both describing API functionalities and interpreting user queries. Thus we hypothesize that API retrieval can be facilitated by explicitly recognizing and matching between the fine-grained structures of functionality descriptions and user queries. To verify this hypothesis, we conducted a large-scale empirical study on the functionality descriptions of 14,733 JDK and Android API methods. We identified 356 different functionality verbs from the descriptions, which were grouped into 87 functionality categories, and we extracted 523 phrase patterns from the verb phrases of the descriptions. Building on these findings, we propose an API method recommendation approach based on explicit matching of functionality verb phrases in functionality descriptions and user queries, called PreMA. Our evaluation shows that PreMA can accurately recognize the functionality categories (92.8%) and phrase patterns (90.4%) of functionality description sentences; and when used for API retrieval tasks, PreMA can help participants complete their tasks more accurately and with fewer retries compared to a baseline approach.

Keywords

API Documentation, API Retrieval, Functionality Description

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ESEC/FSE '20: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering: Virtual, November 8-13

First Page

1015

Last Page

1026

ISBN

9781450370431

Identifier

10.1145/3368089.3409731

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3368089.3409731

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