Automatically Generating Task-Oriented API Learning Guide

Abstract

Learning and reusing open source API libraries remain a time consuming process due to the documentation quality and the knowledge gap between API providers and users. Some researchers and API providers have found that the development tasks would narrow the knowledge gap and meet the needs of busy developers. To our knowledge, there is no existing work to generating task oriented API documents. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach to generating task oriented API learning guide. The guide is organized by a hierarchical task list. We integrate the natural language processing techniques with an evidence-based filtering pipeline in our approach. We also employ a graph-based clustering procedure to generate a three-layer task list. Furthermore, we define the normal form of the task phrases as the metadata in our approach. The approach has been implemented as a tool, APITasks. We used it to generate the API documents for four libraries. In an empirical study, we evaluate the accuracy and completeness of our approach with the manually created benchmarks. The results affirm the capability of our approach.