Enhance code search via reformulating queries with evolving contexts

To improve code search, many query expansion (QE) approaches use APIs or crowd knowledge for expanding a query. However, these approaches may sometimes negatively impact the retrieval performance. This is because they can’t distinguish the relevant terms from the irrelevant ones among a large set of candidate expansion terms and expand a query with irrelevant terms. In this paper, we propose QREC, a query reformulation approach with evolving contexts that refer to new/deleted terms and dependent terms during the code evolution. By considering the new terms as the relevant and the deleted terms as the irrelevant, QREC could reformulate a query with appropriate expansion terms. The experimental results show that QREC outperforms the state-of-the-art QE approaches (e.g., CodeHow and QECK) by 9–11% and improves the precision of the code search algorithms IR, Portfolio and VF by up to 37–45%.