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APIBot: Question answering bot for API documentation
ASE 2017: Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Urbana-Champaign, IL, October 30 - November 3
  • Yuan TIAN, Singapore Management University
  • Ferdian THUNG, Singapore Management University
  • Abhishek SHARMA, Singapore Management University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
11-2017
Abstract

As the carrier of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) knowledge, API documentation plays a crucial role in how developers learn and use an API. It is also a valuable information resource for answering API-related questions, especially when developers cannot find reliable answers to their questions online/offline. However, finding answers to API-related questions from API documentation might not be easy because one may have to manually go through multiple pages before reaching the relevant page, and then read and understand the information inside the relevant page to figure out the answers. To deal with this challenge, we develop APIBot, a bot that can answer API questions given API documentation as an input. APIBot is built on top of SiriusQA, the QA system from Sirius, a state of the art intelligent personal assistant. To make SiriusQA work well under software engineering scenario, we make several modifications over SiriusQA by injecting domain specific knowledge. We evaluate APIBot on 92 API questions, answers of which are known to be present in Java 8 documentation. Our experiment shows that APIBot can achieve a Hit@5 score of 0.706.

Keywords
  • Documentation,
  • Knowledge discovery,
  • Natural languages,
  • Probabilistic logic,
  • Training,
  • Software engineering,
  • Software
ISBN
9781538626849
Identifier
10.1109/ASE.2017.8115628
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2017.8115628
Citation Information
Yuan TIAN, Ferdian THUNG, Abhishek SHARMA and David LO. "APIBot: Question answering bot for API documentation" ASE 2017: Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Urbana-Champaign, IL, October 30 - November 3 (2017) p. 153 - 158
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/166/