"natural language processing"

An Approach to Automatically Assess Method Names

An approach is presented to automatically assess the quality of method names by providing a score and feedback. The approach implements ten method naming standards to evaluate the names. The naming standards are taken from work that validated the …

Understanding Digits in Identifier Names: An Exploratory Study

Before any software maintenance can occur, developers must read the identifier names found in the code to be maintained. Thus, high-quality identifier names are essential for productive program comprehension and maintenance activities. With …

An Ensemble Approach for Annotating Source Code Identifiers with Part-of-speech Tags

This paper presents an ensemble part-of-speech tagging approach for source code identifiers. Ensemble tagging is a technique that uses machine-learning and the output from multiple part-of-speech taggers to annotate natural language text at a higher …

An Empirical Investigation of How and Why Developers Rename Identifiers

Renaming is vital to software maintenance and evolution. Developers rename entities when their original names no longer fit their behavioral role within the program. This may happen if the entity's original name was of poor quality or if the system …