Assieme Finding and Leveraging Implicit References in a

Assieme: Finding and Leveraging Implicit References in a Web Search Interface for Programmers Raphael Hoffmann, James Fogarty, Daniel S. Weld University of Washington, Seattle UIST 2007

Programmers Use Search • To identify an API • To seek information about an API • To find examples on how to use an API Example Task: “Programmatically output an Acrobat PDF file in Java. ”

Example: General Web Search Interface

Example: Code-Specific Web Search Interface …

Problems • Information is dispersed: tutorials, API itself, documentation, pages with samples • Difficult and time-consuming to … – – locate required pieces, get an overview of alternatives, judge relevance and quality of results, understand dependencies. • Many page visits required

With Assieme we … • Designed a new Web search interface • Developed needed inference

Outline • Motivation • What Programmers Search For • The Assieme Search Engine – Inferring Implicit References – Using Implicit References for Scoring • Evaluation of Inference & User Study • Discussion & Conclusion

Six Learning Barriers faced by Programmers (Ko et al. 04) • Design barriers — What to do? • Selection barriers — What to use? • Coordination barriers — How to combine? • Use barriers — How to use? • Understanding barriers — What is wrong? • Information barriers — How to check?

Examining Programmer Web Queries Objective • See what programmers search for Dataset • 15 million queries and click-through data • Random sample of MSN queries in 05/06 Procedure • Extract query sessions containing ‘java’ – 2, 529 • Manual looking at queries and defining regex filters • Informal taxonomy of query sessions

Examining Programmer Web Queries

Examining Programmer Web Queries 64. 1 % 35. 9 % Descriptive Contain package, type or member name “java JSP current date” “java Simple. Date. Format” Selection barrier Use barrier 17. 9 % Contain terms like “example”, “using”, “sample code” “using currentdate in jsp” Coordination barrier

relevance indicated by # uses Assieme documentation example code Summaries show referenced types required libaries links to related info

Challenges ? How to put the right information on the interface • Get all programming-related data • Interpret data and infer relationships

Outline • Motivation • What Programmers Search For • The Assieme Search Engine – Inferring Implicit References – Using Implicit References for Scoring • Evaluation of Inference & User Study • Discussion & Conclusion

Assieme’s Data Pages with code examples Queried Google on “java ±import ±class …” ~2, 360, 000 JAR files Downloaded library files for all projects on Sun. com, Apache. org, Java. net, Source. Forge. net ~79, 000 Java. Doc pages Queried Google on “overview-tree. html …” ~480, 000 … is crawled using existing search engines

The Assieme Search Engine … infers 2 kinds of implicit references JAR files Pages with code examples Uses of packages, types and members ? Matches of packages, types and members Java. Doc pages

Extracting Code Samples unclear segmentation code in a different language (C++) distracting terms ‘…’ in code line numbers

Extracting Code Samples remove HTML commands, but preserve line breaks remove some distracters by heuristics launch (error-tolerant) Java parser at every line break (separately parse for types, methods, and sequences of statements)