Resolving API Mentions in Informal Documents
This addresses the challenge of name overloading in informal documents for developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for entity linking.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically linking API mentions in developer forum posts to their official resources, presenting a technique called ANACE that combines heuristics and machine learning to detect and resolve these mentions.
Developer forums contain opinions and information related to the usage of APIs. API names in forum posts are often not explicitly linked to their official resources. Automatic linking of an API mention to its official resources can be challenging for various reasons, such as, name overloading. We present a technique, ANACE, to automatically resolve API mentions in the textual contents of forum posts. Given a database of APIs, we first detect all words in a forum post that are potential references to an API. We then use a combination of heuristics and machine learning to eliminate false positives and to link true positives to the actual APIs and their resources.