A Query Expansion Method Based on Evolving Source Code

Abstract

The existing query expansion (QE) methods cannot find the most users-requested source code version at times due to the over-expansion resulting from noises. To solve this problem, we propose a QE method based on evolving contexts (EC) that are added/deleted terms and their dependent terms during code evolution. On expanding a query, we appended the added terms as relevant terms, and excluded the deleted terms as noisy terms. We also developed a QE-integrating framework based on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) Ranking, called QESR, to simultaneously integrate multiple QE methods. Our experiment shows that QESR outperforms the state-of-the-art QE methods CodeHow and Query Expansion based on Crowd Knowledge (QECK) by 13%–16% in terms of precision when the first query result is inspected.