Traceability Support for Multi-Lingual Software Projects
This addresses the challenge of maintaining traceability links in globally distributed software projects that use multiple languages, which is an incremental improvement over existing automated methods.
The paper tackled the problem of automated software traceability in multi-lingual projects, where intermingled languages reduce effectiveness, and found that using mono-lingual word embeddings integrated into GVSM with machine translation preprocessing achieved the best performance based on an analysis of 14 Chinese-English projects.
Software traceability establishes associations between diverse software artifacts such as requirements, design, code, and test cases. Due to the non-trivial costs of manually creating and maintaining links, many researchers have proposed automated approaches based on information retrieval techniques. However, many globally distributed software projects produce software artifacts written in two or more languages. The use of intermingled languages reduces the efficacy of automated tracing solutions. In this paper, we first analyze and discuss patterns of intermingled language use across multiple projects, and then evaluate several different tracing algorithms including the Vector Space Model (VSM), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and various models that combine mono- and cross-lingual word embeddings with the Generative Vector Space Model (GVSM). Based on an analysis of 14 Chinese-English projects, our results show that best performance is achieved using mono-lingual word embeddings integrated into GVSM with machine translation as a preprocessing step.