Discovering Essential Code Elements in Informal Documentation
Peter C Rigby
Martin P. Robillard

Link

Problem: Determining the code elements salient to an informal developer communications, such as forum posts.

Importance/Applications of the technique:
Does not require an index of code elements.
Discovers code elements based on salience.

Approach:
1. Developed a tool “Automatic Code Element Extractor (ACE)” which does the following steps:-

• Identify code like terms from a document using Island Parser
• Creates index of valid code elements
• Reparses documents to identify ambiguous terms and resolve them
• Outputs the code elements

2. Created a classifier of code element salience

Evaluation: P= 0.92 R= 0.90

Critique

Strengths:
Discards closed world assumption(where an index is created from before)
Discards uniform importance assumption(previously each code element would have been considered equally important)

Weaknesses:
Unable to identify indirectly referenced code elements(eg: answers to questions in stack overflow is considered not salient, hence miss indirectly referenced code elements which might be salient)