Abstract

Software engineers need to be able to create, modify, and analyze knowledge stored in software artifacts. A significant amount of these artifacts contain natural language, like version control commit messages, source code comments, or bug reports. Integrated software development environments (IDEs) are widely used, but they are only concerned with structured software artifacts – they do not offer support for analyzing unstructured natural language and relating this knowledge with the source code. We present an integration of natural language processing capabilities into the Eclipse framework, a widely used software IDE. It allows to execute NLP analysis pipelines through the Semantic Assistants framework, a service-oriented architecture for brokering NLP services based on GATE. We demonstrate a number of semantic analysis services helpful in software engineering tasks, and evaluate one task in detail, the quality analysis of source code comments.

Reference

René Witte, Bahar Sateli, Ninus Khamis, and Juergen Rilling, Intelligent Software Development Environments: Integrating Natural Language Processing with the Eclipse Platform. 24th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Canadian AI 2011), LNCS vol. 6657, St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, Springer-Verlag, pp. 408--419, May 25--27, 2011. (Acceptance rate: 28%)

Bibtex entry (also for download):

@conference {wskr11,
	title = {Intelligent Software Development Environments: 
                 Integrating Natural Language Processing with the Eclipse Platform},
	author = {Ren{\'e} Witte and Bahar Sateli and Ninus Khamis and Juergen Rilling},
	editor = {Cory Butz and Pawan Lingras},
	booktitle = {24th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Canadian AI 2011)},
	series = {LNAI},
	volume = {6657},
	year = {2011},
	month = {May 25--27},
	pages = {408--419},
	publisher = {Springer-Verlag},
	type = {Paper},
	address = {St. John{\textquoteright}s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada},
	keywords = {Eclipse, NLP, Semantic Assistants},
	isbn = {978-3-642-21043-3},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-21043-3_49},
	url = {http://www.springerlink.com/content/2664412325t894u3/}
}

More information

• Documentation on the open source project and Eclipse update site for the plug-in described in this paper
• Paper information on semanticsoftware.info
• Paper information on SpringerLink
• Paper information on Google Scholar
• Home page of the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2011

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Online version at SpringerLink.
Local copy: cai11-saeclipse.pdf
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Copyright © 2011 Springer-Verlag. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for your personal use. Not for redistribution. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-21043-3_49.