Authors
Feng Zhang, Haoran Niu, Iman Keivanloo, Ying Zou
Publication date
2017/9/11
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Volume
44
Issue
11
Pages
1070-1082
Publisher
IEEE
Description
When encountering unfamiliar programming tasks (e.g., connecting to a database), there is a need to seek potential working code examples. Instead of using code search engines, software developers usually post related programming questions on online Q&A forums (e.g., Stack Overflow). One possible reason is that existing code search engines would return effective code examples only if a query contains identifiers (e.g., class or method names). In other words, existing code search engines do not handle natural-language queries well (e.g., a description of a programming task). However, developers may not know the appropriate identifiers at the time of the search. As the demand of searching code examples is increasing, it is of significant interest to enhance code search engines. We conjecture that expanding natural-language queries with their semantically related identifiers has a great potential to enhance …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
F Zhang, H Niu, I Keivanloo, Y Zou - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2017