A Light Bug Triage Framework for Applying Large Pre-trained Language Model

Abstract

Assigning appropriate developers to the bugs is one of the main challenges in bug triage. Demands for automatic bug triage are increasing in the industry, as manual bug triage is labor-intensive and time-consuming in large projects. The key to the bug triage task is extracting semantic information from a bug report. In recent years, large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) including BERT [4] have achieved dramatic progress in the natural language processing (NLP) domain. However, applying large PLMs to the bug triage task for extracting semantic information has several challenges. In this paper, we address the challenges and propose a novel framework for bug triage named LBT-P, standing for Light Bug Triage framework with a Pre-trained language model. It compresses a large PLM into small and fast models using knowledge distillation techniques and also prevents catastrophic forgetting of PLM by introducing knowledge preservation fine-tuning. We also develop a new loss function exploiting representations of earlier layers as well as deeper layers in order to handle the overthinking problem. We demonstrate our proposed framework on the real-world private dataset and three public real-world datasets [11]: Google Chromium, Mozilla Core, and Mozilla Firefox. The result of the experiments shows the superiority of LBT-P.