Labeling source code with information retrieval methods: an empirical study

To support program comprehension, software artifacts can be labeled—for example within software visualization tools—with a set of representative words, hereby referred to as labels. Such labels can be obtained using various approaches, including Information Retrieval (IR) methods or other simple heuristics. They provide a bird-eye’s view of the source code, allowing developers to look over software components fast and make more informed decisions on which parts of the source code they need to analyze in detail. However, few empirical studies have been conducted to verify whether the extracted labels make sense to software developers. This paper investigates (i) to what extent various IR techniques and other simple heuristics overlap with (and differ from) labeling performed by humans; (ii) what kinds of source code terms do humans use when labeling software artifacts; and (iii) what factors—in particular what characteristics of the artifacts to be labeled—influence the performance of automatic labeling techniques. We conducted two experiments in which we asked a group of students (38 in total) to label 20 classes from two Java software systems, JHotDraw and eXVantage. Then, we analyzed to what extent the words identified with an automated technique—including Vector Space Models, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), as well as customized heuristics extracting words from specific source code elements—overlap with those identified by humans. Results indicate that, in most cases, simpler automatic labeling techniques—based on the use of words extracted from class and method names as well as from class comments—better reflect human-based labeling. Indeed, clustering-based approaches (LSI and LDA) are more worthwhile to be used for source code artifacts having a high verbosity, as well as for artifacts requiring more effort to be manually labeled. The obtained results help to define guidelines on how to build effective automatic labeling techniques, and provide some insights on the actual usefulness of automatic labeling techniques during program comprehension tasks.