Crowd Sourced Data Analysis: Mapping of Programming Concepts to Syntactical Patterns
This addresses the tedious code search problem for developers, though it is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of code search by creating a mapping between programming concepts and natural language keywords using Stack Overflow data, enabling developers to search code using natural language terms instead of syntactical patterns.
Since programming concepts do not match their syntactic representations, code search is a very tedious task. For instance in Java or C, array doesn't match [], so using "array" as a query, one cannot find what they are looking for. Often developers have to search code whether to understand any code, or to reuse some part of that code, or just to read it, without natural language searching, developers have to often scroll back and forth or use variable names as their queries. In our work, we have used Stackoverflow (SO) question and answers to make a mapping of programming concepts with their respective natural language keywords, and then tag these natural language terms to every line of code, which can further we used in searching using natural language keywords.