A similarity measure for retrieving software artifacts.
Marisa Girardi, Bertrand Ibrahim · 1994
This paper introduces the main features and the retrieval mechanism of ROSA, a software reuse system based on the processing of the natural language descriptions of software artifacts. The system supports the automatic indexing of components by acquiring lexical, syntactic and semantic knowledge from software descriptions. The retrieval mechanism is based on a similarity analysis that provides good retrieval effectiveness through partial matching of descriptions, processing of synonyms, generalizations and specializations of terms and considering the syntactic and semantic information available in the descriptors of software artifacts. 1 Introduction Reuse systems that index software components manually are difficult and expensive to set up. Automatic indexing is required to turn software retrieval systems cost-effective. On the other hand, the effectiveness of traditional keywordbased retrieval systems is limited by the so-called "keyword barrier" [7], i.e. these systems are unable...