Engineering Commons^™

Augmenting And Structuring User Queries To Support Efficient Free-Form Code Search, Raphael Sirres, Tegawendé F. Bissyande, Dongsun Kim, David Lo, Jacques Klein, Kisub Kim, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Source code terms such as method names and variable types are often different from conceptual words mentioned in a search query. This vocabulary mismatch problem can make code search inefficient. In this paper, we present COde voCABUlary (CoCaBu), an approach to resolving the vocabulary mismatch problem when dealing with free-form code search queries. Our approach leverages common developer questions and the associated expert answers to augment user queries with the relevant, but missing, structural code entities in order to improve the performance of matching relevant code examples within large code repositories. To instantiate this approach, we build GitSearch, a code …