Stepwise API usage assistance using n-gram language models

André L. Santos

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2016.06.063

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Stepwise API usage assistance using n-gram language models

2017-09-01

DOI：10.1016/j.jss.2016.06.063

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Abstract

En 中文

Reusing software involves learning third-party APIs, a process that is often time-consuming and error prone. Recommendation systems for API usage assistance based on statistical models built from source code corpora are capable of assisting API users through code completion mechanisms in IDEs. A valid sequence of API calls involving different types may be regarded as a well-formed sentence of tokens from the API vocabulary. In this article we describe an approach for recommending subsequent tokens to complete API sentences using n-gram language models built from source code corpora. The provided system was integrated in the code completion facilities of the Eclipse IDE, providing contextualized completion proposals for Java taking into account the nearest lines of code. The approach was evaluated against existing client code of four widely used APIs, revealing that in more than 90% of the cases the expected subsequent token is within the 10-top-most proposals of our models. The high score provides evidence that the recommendations could help on API learning and exploration, namely through the assistance on writing valid API sentences. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords:

API

Usability

N-grams

Code completion

IDE

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