Natural Language-Programming Language Software Traceability Link Recovery Needs More than Textual Similarity
This addresses the limitation of textual similarity in software engineering tasks for developers and researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing models with added strategies.
The paper tackled the problem of software traceability link recovery between natural language and programming language artifacts, showing that integrating multiple domain-specific strategies into models like Heterogeneous Graph Transformer and Gemini 2.5 Pro improved performance, with average F1-score gains of 3.68% and 8.84% over the state-of-the-art method.
In the field of software traceability link recovery (TLR), textual similarity has long been regarded as the core criterion. However, in tasks involving natural language and programming language (NL-PL) artifacts, relying solely on textual similarity is limited by their semantic gap. To this end, we conducted a large-scale empirical evaluation across various types of TLR tasks, revealing the limitations of textual similarity in NL-PL scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose an approach that incorporates multiple domain-specific auxiliary strategies, identified through empirical analysis, into two models: the Heterogeneous Graph Transformer (HGT) via edge types and the prompt-based Gemini 2.5 Pro via additional input information. We then evaluated our approach using the widely studied requirements-to-code TLR task, a representative case of NL-PL TLR. Experimental results show that both the multi-strategy HGT and Gemini 2.5 Pro models outperformed their original counterparts without strategy integration. Furthermore, compared to the current state-of-the-art method HGNNLink, the multi-strategy HGT and Gemini 2.5 Pro models achieved average F1-score improvements of 3.68% and 8.84%, respectively, across twelve open-source projects, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-strategy integration in enhancing overall model performance for the requirements-code TLR task.