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Learning to Infer API Mappings from API Documents

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Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10412))

Abstract

To satisfy business requirements of various platforms and devices, developers often need to migrate software code from one platform to another. During this process, a key task is to figure out API mappings between API libraries of the source and target platforms. Since doing it manually is time-consuming and error-prone, several code-based approaches have been proposed. However, they often have the issues of availability on parallel code bases and time expense caused by static or dynamic code analysis.

In this paper, we present a document-based approach to infer API mappings. We first learn to understand the semantics of API names and descriptions in API documents by a word embedding model. Then we combine the word embeddings with a text similarity algorithm to compute semantic similarities between APIs of the source and target API libraries. Finally, we infer API mappings from the ranking results of API similarities. Our approach is evaluated on API documents of JavaSE and .NET. The results outperform the baseline model at precision@k by 41.51% averagely. Compared with code-based work, our approach avoids their issues and leverages easily acquired API documents to infer API mappings effectively.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://radimrehurek.com/gensim.

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Acknowledgement

This research is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (the 973 Program) under Grant No. 2015CB352201 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61421091, 61232015 and 61502014.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Lab of High-Confidence Software Technology, Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Yangyang Lu, Ge Li, Zelong Zhao, Linfeng Wen & Zhi Jin

  2. School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Yangyang Lu, Ge Li, Zelong Zhao, Linfeng Wen & Zhi Jin

Authors
  1. Yangyang Lu
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  2. Ge Li
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  3. Zelong Zhao
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  4. Linfeng Wen
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  5. Zhi Jin
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ge Li or Zhi Jin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia

    Gang Li

  2. University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Yong Ge

  3. Southwest University, Chongqing, China

    Zili Zhang

  4. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Zhi Jin

  5. University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Michael Blumenstein

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© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

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Lu, Y., Li, G., Zhao, Z., Wen, L., Jin, Z. (2017). Learning to Infer API Mappings from API Documents. In: Li, G., Ge, Y., Zhang, Z., Jin, Z., Blumenstein, M. (eds) Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management. KSEM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10412. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63558-3_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63558-3_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63557-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63558-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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