Disambiguating Mentions of API Methods in Stack Overflow via Type Scoping

Abstract

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular venues for developers to find answers to their API-related questions. However, API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow are often ambiguous and thus it could be difficult to find the APIs and learn their usages. Disambiguating these API mentions is not trivial, as an API mention can match with names of APIs from different libraries or even the same one. In this paper, we propose an approach called DATYS to disambiguate API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow using type scoping. With type scoping, we consider API methods whose type (i.e. class or interface) appear in more parts (i.e., scopes) of a Stack Overflow thread as more likely to be the API method that the mention refers to. We have evaluated our approach on a dataset of 807 API mentions from 380 threads containing discussions of API methods from four popular third-party Java libraries. Our experiment shows that our approach beats the state-of-the-art by 42.86% in terms of F1-score.