Supporting Source Code Search with Context-Aware and Semantics-Driven Query Reformulation

Software bugs and failures cost trillions of dollars every year, and could even lead to deadly accidents (e.g., Therac-25 accident). During maintenance, software developers fix numerous bugs and implement hundreds of new features by making necessary changes to the existing software code. Once an issue report (e.g., bug report, change request) is assigned to a developer, she chooses a few important keywords from the report as a search query, and then attempts to find out the exact locations in the software code that need to be either repaired or enhanced. As a part of this maintenance, developers also often select ad hoc queries on the fly, and attempt to locate the reusable code from the Internet that could assist them either in bug fixing or in feature implementation. Unfortunately, even the experienced developers often fail to construct the right search queries. Even if the developers come up with a few ad hoc queries, most of them require frequent modifications which cost significant development time and efforts. Thus, construction of an appropriate query for localizing the software bugs, programming concepts or even the reusable code is a major challenge. In this thesis, we overcome this query construction challenge with six studies, and develop a novel, effective code search solution (BugDoctor) that assists the developers in localizing the software code of interest (e.g., bugs, concepts and reusable code) during software maintenance. In particular, we reformulate a given search query (1) by designing novel keyword selection algorithms (e.g., CodeRank) that outperform the traditional alternatives (e.g., TF-IDF), (2) by leveraging the bug report quality paradigm and source document structures which were previously overlooked and (3) by exploiting the crowd knowledge and word semantics derived from Stack Overflow Q&A site, which were previously untapped. Our experiment using 5000+ search queries (bug reports, change requests, and ad hoc queries) suggests that our proposed approach can improve the given queries significantly through automated query reformulations. Comparison with 10+ existing studies on bug localization, concept location and Internet-scale code search suggests that our approach can outperform the state-of-the-art approaches with a significant margin

Design of an E-learning system using semantic information and cloud computing technologies

Humanity is currently suffering from many difficult problems that threaten the life and survival of the human race. It is very easy for all mankind to be affected, directly or indirectly, by these problems. Education is a key solution for most of them. In our thesis we tried to make use of current technologies to enhance and ease the learning process. We have designed an e-learning system based on semantic information and cloud computing, in addition to many other technologies that contribute to improving the educational process and raising the level of students. The design was built after much research on useful technology, its types, and examples of actual systems that were previously discussed by other researchers. In addition to the proposed design, an algorithm was implemented to identify topics found in large textual educational resources. It was tested and proved to be efficient against other methods. The algorithm has the ability of extracting the main topics from textual learning resources, linking related resources and generating interactive dynamic knowledge graphs. This algorithm accurately and efficiently accomplishes those tasks even for bigger books. We used Wikipedia Miner, TextRank, and Gensim within our algorithm. Our algorithm‘s accuracy was evaluated against Gensim, largely improving its accuracy. Augmenting the system design with the implemented algorithm will produce many useful services for improving the learning process such as: identifying main topics of big textual learning resources automatically and connecting them to other well defined concepts from Wikipedia, enriching current learning resources with semantic information from external sources, providing student with browsable dynamic interactive knowledge graphs, and making use of learning groups to encourage students to share their learning experiences and feedback with other learners.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Luis Sánchez Fernández.- Secretario: Luis de la Fuente Valentín.- Vocal: Norberto Fernández Garcí

Strategies for the analysis of large social media corpora: sampling and keyword extraction methods

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms such as Twitter have been of great importance for users to exchange news, ideas, and perceptions. Researchers from fields such as discourse analysis and the social sciences have resorted to this content to explore public opinion and stance on this topic, and they have tried to gather information through the compilation of large-scale corpora. However, the size of such corpora is both an advantage and a drawback, as simple text retrieval techniques and tools may prove to be impractical or altogether incapable of handling such masses of data. This study provides methodological and practical cues on how to manage the contents of a large-scale social media corpus such as Chen et al. (JMIR Public Health Surveill 6(2):e19273, 2020) COVID-19 corpus. We compare and evaluate, in terms of efficiency and efficacy, available methods to handle such a large corpus. First, we compare different sample sizes to assess whether it is possible to achieve similar results despite the size difference and evaluate sampling methods following a specific data management approach to storing the original corpus. Second, we examine two keyword extraction methodologies commonly used to obtain a compact representation of the main subject and topics of a text: the traditional method used in corpus linguistics, which compares word frequencies using a reference corpus, and graph-based techniques as developed in Natural Language Processing tasks. The methods and strategies discussed in this study enable valuable quantitative and qualitative analyses of an otherwise intractable mass of social media data.Funding for open access publishing: Universidad de Málaga/CBUA. This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [Grant No. PID2020-115310RB-I00], the Regional Govvernment of Andalusia [Grant No. UMA18-FEDERJA-158] and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Vocational Training [Grant No. FPU 19/04880]. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBU

Topic Distiller:distilling semantic topics from documents

Abstract. This thesis details the design and implementation of a system that can find relevant and latent semantic topics from textual documents. The design of this system, named Topic Distiller, is inspired by research conducted on automatic keyphrase extraction and automatic topic labeling, and it employs entity linking and knowledge bases to reduce text documents to their semantic topics. The Topic Distiller is evaluated using methods and datasets used in information retrieval and automatic keyphrase extraction. On top of the common datasets used in the literature three additional datasets are created to evaluate the system. The evaluation reveals that the Topic Distiller is able to find relevant and latent topics from textual documents, beating the state-of-the-art automatic keyphrase methods in performance when used on news articles and social media posts.Semanttisten aiheiden suodattaminen dokumenteista. Tiivistelmä. Tässä diplomityössä tarkastellaan järjestelmää, joka pystyy löytämään tekstistä relevantteja ja piileviä semanttisia aihealueita, sekä kyseisen järjestelmän suunnittelua ja implementaatiota. Tämän Topic Distiller -järjestelmän suunnittelu ammentaa inspiraatiota automaattisen termintunnistamisen ja automaattisen aiheiden nimeämisen tutkimuksesta sekä hyödyntää automaattista semanttista annotointia ja tietämyskantoja tekstin aihealueiden löytämisessä. Topic Distiller -järjestelmän suorituskykyä mitataan hyödyntämällä kirjallisuudessa paljon käytettyjä automaattisen termintunnistamisen evaluontimenetelmiä ja aineistoja. Näiden yleisten aineistojen lisäksi esittelemme kolme uutta aineistoa, jotka on luotu Topic Distiller -järjestelmän arviointia varten. Evaluointi tuo ilmi, että Topic Distiller kykenee löytämään relevantteja ja piileviä aiheita tekstistä. Se päihittää kirjallisuuden viimeisimmät automaattisen termintunnistamisen menetelmät suorituskyvyssä, kun sitä käytetään uutisartikkelien sekä sosiaalisen median julkaisujen analysointiin