A supervised approach for tag hierarchy construction in open source communities

Abstract

The massive amounts of open source software provide sufficient reusable resources for software development. Most of the OSS communities adopt a kind of categorization or tagging mechanism to organize the software. However, the categorization often too coarse, while the tags are flat and fail to capture the inter-relation among them. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to reveal the latent relations between tags and build a tag hierarchy to help locate resources. We firstly build a co-occurrence network, based on which we compare the connotations of tags and construct a preliminary hierarchy. Then we leverage the domain knowledge of category in SourceForge to optimize and improve the relations between tags. At the end, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the constructed tag hierarchy with quantitative evaluation, which suggest the validation of our approach.