Title
To Do or Not To Do: Distill crowdsourced negative caveats to augment api documentation
Abstract
AbstractNegative caveats of application programming interfaces (APIs) are about “how not to use an API,” which are often absent from the official API documentation. When these caveats are overlooked, programming errors may emerge from misusing APIs, leading to heavy discussions on Q&A websites like Stack Overflow. If the overlooked caveats could be mined from these discussions, they would be beneficial for programmers to avoid misuse of APIs. However, it is challenging because the discussions are informal, redundant, and diverse. For this, for example, we propose Disca, a novel approach for automatically Distilling desirable API negative caveats from unstructured Q&A discussions. Through sentence selection and prominent term clustering, Disca ensures that distilled caveats are context‐independent, prominent, semantically diverse, and nonredundant. Quantitative evaluation in our experiments shows that the proposed Disca significantly outperforms four text‐summarization techniques. We also show that the distilled API negative caveats could greatly augment API documentation through qualitative analysis.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1002/asi.24067
Periodicals
Field
DocType
Volume
Information retrieval,Computer science,Application programming interface,Augment,Stack overflow,Cluster analysis,Sentence
Journal
69
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
12
2330-1635
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
10
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jing Li110813.74
Aixin Sun23071156.89
Zhenchang Xing3138787.95