Automatic Analysis of Available Source Code of Top Artificial Intelligence Conference Papers
This addresses the labor-intensive task for researchers and organizations needing to reproduce AI methods, though it is incremental as it automates an existing manual process.
The authors tackled the problem of manually identifying AI papers with available source code by proposing an automated method to detect and extract repository URLs, finding that 20.5% of papers from 2010-2019 had accessible code and 8.1% of repositories were no longer accessible.
Source code is essential for researchers to reproduce the methods and replicate the results of artificial intelligence (AI) papers. Some organizations and researchers manually collect AI papers with available source code to contribute to the AI community. However, manual collection is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. To address this issue, we propose a method to automatically identify papers with available source code and extract their source code repository URLs. With this method, we find that 20.5% of regular papers of 10 top AI conferences published from 2010 to 2019 are identified as papers with available source code and that 8.1% of these source code repositories are no longer accessible. We also create the XMU NLP Lab README Dataset, the largest dataset of labeled README files for source code document research. Through this dataset, we have discovered that quite a few README files have no installation instructions or usage tutorials provided. Further, a large-scale comprehensive statistical analysis is made for a general picture of the source code of AI conference papers. The proposed solution can also go beyond AI conference papers to analyze other scientific papers from both journals and conferences to shed light on more domains.