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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title Supporting developers with natural language queries
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Michael Würsch
  • Giacomo Ghezzi
  • G Reif
  • H C Gall
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Page Range 165 - 174
Event Title 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
Event Type conference
Event Location Cape Town, South Africa
Event Start Date May 2 - 2010
Event End Date May 2 - 2010
Abstract Text The feature list of modern IDEs is growing steadily and mastering these tools becomes more and more demanding, especially for novice programmers. Despite their remarkable capabilities, IDEs often still cannot directly answer the questions that arise during program comprehension tasks. Instead developers have to map their questions to multiple concrete queries that can be answered only by combining several tools and examining the output of each of them manually to distill an appropriate answer. Existing approaches have in common that they are either limited to a set of predefined, hardcoded questions, or that they require to learn a specific query language only suitable for that limited purpose. We present a framework to query for information about a software system using guided-input natural language resembling plain English. For that, we model data extracted by classical software analysis tools with an OWL ontology and use knowledge processing technologies from the Semantic Web to query it. We also present a case study that demonstrates how our framework can be used to answer queries about static source code information for program comprehension purposes.
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1145/1806799.1806827
Other Identification Number merlin-id:73
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