inferring method specifications from natural language api descriptions

ISCAS OpenIR

	inferring method specifications from natural language api descriptions
	Pandita Rahul; Xiao Xusheng; Zhong Hao; Xie Tao; Oney Stephen; Paradkar Amit
	2012
会议名称	34th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2012
会议录名称	Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
页码	815-825
会议日期	June 2, 2012 - June 9, 2012
会议地点	Zurich, Switzerland
收录类别	EI
ISSN	0270-5257
ISBN	9781467310673
部门归属	(1) Department of Computer Science North Carolina State University Raleigh NC United States; (2) Laboratory for Internet Software Technologies Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing China; (3) Human-Computer Interaction Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh PA United States; (4) I.B.M. T. J. Watson Research Center Hawthorne NY United States
摘要	Application Programming Interface (API) documents are a typical way of describing legal usage of reusable software libraries, thus facilitating software reuse. However, even with such documents, developers often overlook some documents and build software systems that are inconsistent with the legal usage of those libraries. Existing software verification tools require formal specifications (such as code contracts), and therefore cannot directly verify the legal usage described in natural language text in API documents against code using that library. However, in practice, most libraries do not come with formal specifications, thus hindering tool-based verification. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach to infer formal specifications from natural language text of API documents. Our evaluation results show that our approach achieves an average of 92% precision and 93% recall in identifying sentences that describe code contracts from more than 2500 sentences of API documents. Furthermore, our results show that our approach has an average 83% accuracy in inferring specifications from over 1600 sentences describing code contracts. © 2012 IEEE.; Application Programming Interface (API) documents are a typical way of describing legal usage of reusable software libraries, thus facilitating software reuse. However, even with such documents, developers often overlook some documents and build software systems that are inconsistent with the legal usage of those libraries. Existing software verification tools require formal specifications (such as code contracts), and therefore cannot directly verify the legal usage described in natural language text in API documents against code using that library. However, in practice, most libraries do not come with formal specifications, thus hindering tool-based verification. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach to infer formal specifications from natural language text of API documents. Our evaluation results show that our approach achieves an average of 92% precision and 93% recall in identifying sentences that describe code contracts from more than 2500 sentences of API documents. Furthermore, our results show that our approach has an average 83% accuracy in inferring specifications from over 1600 sentences describing code contracts. © 2012 IEEE.
关键词	Computer Software Reusability Software Engineering Specifications
主办者	IEEE Computer Society; ACM; University of Zurich (UZH), Department of Informatics; Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE); Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT); SI-SE
语种	英语
内容类型	会议论文
URI标识	http://ir.iscas.ac.cn/handle/311060/15784
专题	中国科学院软件研究所
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Pandita Rahul,Xiao Xusheng,Zhong Hao,et al. inferring method specifications from natural language api descriptions[C],2012:815-825.