Using English to Retrieve Software

M. R. Girardi and B. Ibrahim
University of Geneva, Centre Universitaire d'Informatique
CH-1211 Geneve 4, Switzerland
E-mail: {girardi, bertrand}@cui.unige.ch

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Abstract

This paper describes ROSA, a software reuse system based on the processing of the natural language descriptions of software artifacts. The system aims at being cost-effective, domain independent and providing good retrieval performance. Lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis of software descriptions is performed to automatically extract both verbal and nominal phrases from descriptions and use this information to create frame-based indexing units for software components. Retrieval similarity measures provide good retrieval effectiveness by supporting the matching of terms that are in the same semantic classes, partial matching and processing of lexical relationships between terms. Some results from an experiment evaluating retrieval effectiveness are discussed.

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