Better together: Automated app review analysis with deep multi-task learning

Context:

User reviews of mobile apps provide an important communication channel between developers and users. Existing approaches to automated app review analysis mainly focus on one task (e.g., bug classification task, information extraction task, etc.) at a time, and are often constrained by the manually defined patterns and the ignorance of the correlations among the tasks. Recently, multi-task learning (MTL) has been successfully applied in many scenarios, with the potential to address the limitations associated with app review mining tasks.

Objective:

In this paper, we propose MABLE, a deep MTL-based and semantic-aware approach, to improve app review analysis by exploiting task correlations.

Methods:

MABLE jointly identifies the types of involved bugs reported in the review and extracts the fine-grained features where bugs might occur. It consists of three main phases: (1) data preparation phase, which prepares data to allow data sharing beyond single task learning; (2) model construction phase, which employs a BERT model as the shared representation layer to capture the semantic meanings of reviews, and task-specific layers to model two tasks in parallel; (3) model training phase, which enables eavesdropping by shared loss function between the two related tasks.

Results:

Evaluation results on six apps show that MABLE outperforms ten commonly-used and state-of-the-art baselines, with the precision of 79.76% and the recall of 79.24% for classifying bugs, and the precision of 79.83% and the recall of 80.33% for extracting problematic app features. The MTL mechanism improves the F-measure of two tasks by 3.80% and 4.63%, respectively.

Conclusion:

The proposed approach provides a novel and effective way to jointly learn two related review analysis tasks, and sheds light on exploring other review mining tasks.