Mining evolutionary dependencies from web‐localization repositories
Huzefa Kagdi, Jonathan I. Maletic · Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution Research and Practice · 2007
Abstract An approach to mining repositories of web‐based user documentation for patterns of evolutionary change in the context of internationalization and localization is presented. Localized web documents that are frequently co‐changed (i.e., an evolutionary dependency) during the natural language translation process are uncovered to support the future evolution of the system. A sequential‐pattern mining technique is used to uncover patterns from version histories. Characteristics of the uncovered patterns such as size, frequency, and occurrence within a single natural language or across multiple languages are discussed. Such patterns help provide an insight into the effort required in retranslation due to a change in the documentation. The approach is validated on the open source K Desktop Environment (KDE) system. KDE maintains documentation for over 50 different natural languages and presents a prime example of the problem. The technique accurately predicts which documents in KDE are retranslated or updated in future versions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.