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

[[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.mcgill.ca%2F~martin%2Fpapers%2Ficse2013.pdf&ei=ZVYbVKb_Gs7qoATytYG4Aw&usg=AFQjCNEM0UobXT16enNDJbSsrcAXjiMuiQ&bvm=bv.75097201,bs.1,d.b2U|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)