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Article
Rule-based specification mining leveraging learning to rank
Automated Software Engineering
  • Zherui CAO, Zhejiang University
  • Yuan TIAN, Singapore Management University
  • Bui Tien Duy LE, Singapore Management University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
9-2018
Abstract

Software systems are often released without formal specifications. To deal with the problem of lack of and outdated specifications, rule-based specification mining approaches have been proposed. These approaches analyze execution traces of a system to infer the rules that characterize the protocols, typically of a library, that its clients must obey. Rule-based specification mining approaches work by exploring the search space of all possible rules and use interestingness measures to differentiate specifications from false positives. Previous rule-based specification mining approaches often rely on one or two interestingness measures, while the potential benefit of combining multiple available interestingness measures is not yet investigated. In this work, we propose a learning to rank based approach that automatically learns a good combination of 38 interestingness measures. Our experiments show that the learning to rank based approach outperforms the best performing approach leveraging single interestingness measure by up to 66%.

Keywords
  • Specification mining; Learning to rank; Automated software development; Software maintenance and evolution
Identifier
10.1007/s10515-018-0231-z
Publisher
Springer Verlag (Germany)
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-018-0231-z
Citation Information
Zherui CAO, Yuan TIAN, Bui Tien Duy LE and David LO. "Rule-based specification mining leveraging learning to rank" Automated Software Engineering Vol. 25 Iss. 3 (2018) p. 501 - 530 ISSN: 0928-8910
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/320/