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RACK: Code search in the IDE using crowdsourced knowledge
Proceedings of the 39th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017)
  • Mohammad Masudur RAHMAN
  • Chanchal Kumar ROY
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Publication Date
5-2017
Abstract

Traditional code search engines often do not perform well with natural language queries since they mostly apply keyword matching. These engines thus require carefully designed queries containing information about programming APIs for code search. Unfortunately, existing studies suggest that preparing an effective query for code search is both challenging and time consuming for the developers. In this paper, we propose a novel code search tool-RACK-that returns relevant source code for a given code search query written in natural language text. The tool first translates the query into a list of relevant API classes by mining keyword-API associations from the crowdsourced knowledge of Stack Overflow, and then applies the reformulated query to GitHub code search API for collecting relevant results. Once a query related to a programming task is submitted, the tool automatically mines relevant code snippets from thousands of open-source projects, and displays them as a ranked list within the context of the developer's programming environment-the IDE. Tool page: http://www.usask.ca/~masud.rahman/rack.

Keywords
  • Tools,
  • Natural languages,
  • Programming,
  • Search engines,
  • Context,
  • Search problems,
  • Vocabulary
ISBN
978-1-5386-1589-8
Identifier
10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.11
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.11
Citation Information
Mohammad Masudur RAHMAN, Chanchal Kumar ROY and David LO. "RACK: Code search in the IDE using crowdsourced knowledge" Proceedings of the 39th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017) (2017)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/311/