GitHub Issue Classification Using BERT-Style Models

Abstract

Recent innovations in natural language processing techniques have led to the development of various tools for assisting software developers. This paper provides a report of our proposed solution to the issue report classification task from the NL-Based Software Engineering workshop. We approach the task of classifying issues on GitHub repositories using BERT-style models [1, 2, 6, 8] We propose a neural architecture for the problem that utilizes contextual embeddings for the text content in the GitHub issues. Besides, we design additional features for the classification task. We perform a thorough ablation analysis of the designed features and benchmark various BERT-style models for generating textual embeddings. Our proposed solution performs better than the competition organizer’s method and achieves an F1 score of 0.8653. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Kadam-Tushar/Issue-Classifier.