Part of Speech Tagging Java Method Names
Olney Wyatt, Emily Hill, Chris Thurber, Lemma Bezalem · 2016
Numerous software engineering tools for evolution and comprehension, including code search, comment generation, and analyzing bug reports, make use of part-of-speech (POS) information. However, many POS taggers are developed for, and trained on, natural language. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy of 9 POS taggers on over 200 source code identifiers taken from method names in open source Java programs. The set of taggers includes traditional POS taggers for English as well as some tuned to source code identifiers. Our results indicate that taggers tailored for source code are significantly more effective.