Contrastive Learning for API Aspect Analysis
This work addresses API selection challenges for developers by improving aspect detection accuracy, though it is incremental as it builds on existing transformer methods.
The paper tackled API aspect detection in developer reviews by introducing CLAA, a method using transformer models with supervised contrastive loss, which achieved 92% accuracy on a labeled dataset, outperforming the SOTA baseline at 81.5%.
We present a novel approach - CLAA - for API aspect detection in API reviews that utilizes transformer models trained with a supervised contrastive loss objective function. We evaluate CLAA using performance and impact analysis. For performance analysis, we utilized a benchmark dataset on developer discussions collected from Stack Overflow and compare the results to those obtained using state-of-the-art transformer models. Our experiments show that contrastive learning can significantly improve the performance of transformer models in detecting aspects such as Performance, Security, Usability, and Documentation. For impact analysis, we performed empirical and developer study. On a randomly selected and manually labeled 200 online reviews, CLAA achieved 92% accuracy while the SOTA baseline achieved 81.5%. According to our developer study involving 10 participants, the use of 'Stack Overflow + CLAA' resulted in increased accuracy and confidence during API selection. Replication package: https://github.com/disa-lab/Contrastive-Learning-API-Aspect-ASE2023