Paper Info
Title
An Empirical Study of Abbreviations and Expansions in Software Artifacts
Abstract
Expanding abbreviations is an important text normalization technique used for the purpose of either increasing developer comprehension or supporting the application of natural-language-based tools for source code identifiers. This paper closely studies abbreviations and where their expansions occur in different software artifacts. Without abbreviation expansion, developers will spend more time in comprehending the code they need to update, and tools analyzing software may obtain weak or non-generalizable results. There are numerous techniques for expanding abbreviations, most of which struggle to reach an average expansion accuracy of 59-62% on general source code identifiers. In this paper, we reveal some characteristics of abbreviations and their expansions through an empirical study of 861 abbreviation-expansion pairs extracted from 5 open-source systems in addition to analyzing previous literature. We use these characteristics to identify how current approaches may be complementary and how their results should be reported in the future to help maximize both our understanding of how they compare with other expansion techniques and their reproducibility.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICSME.2019.00040
2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Program Comprehension, abbreviation expansion, software maintenance, software evolution
Information retrieval,Identifier,Systems engineering,Computer science,Source code,Software,Documentation,Java,Empirical research,Text normalization,Comprehension
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6773
978-1-7281-3095-8
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.72
13
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christian Donald Newman160.72
Michael John Decker2201.58
Reem S. Alsuhaibani3203.88
Anthony Peruma4465.98
Dishant Kaushik560.72
Emily Hill683434.58