Applying Convolutional Neural Networks With Different Word Representation Techniques to Recommend Bug Fixers

Abstract

Bug triage processes are intended to assign bug reports to appropriate developers effectively, but they typically become bottlenecks in the development process—especially for large-scale software projects. Recently, several machine learning approaches, including deep learning-based approaches, have been proposed to recommend an appropriate developer automatically by learning past assignment patterns. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based bug triage technique using a convolutional neural network (CNN) with three different word representation techniques: Word to Vector (Word2Vec), Global Vector (GloVe), and Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo). Experiments were performed on datasets from well-known large-scale open-source projects, such as Eclipse and Mozilla, and top-k accuracy was measured as an evaluation metric. The experimental results suggest that the ELMo-based CNN approach performs best for the bug triage problem. GloVe-based CNN slightly outperforms Word2Vec-based CNN in many cases. Word2Vec-based CNN outperforms GloVe-based CNN when the number of samples per class in the dataset is high enough.