# TextRank Based Search Term Identification for Software Change Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.02263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Systematic Review of Automated Query Reformulations in Source Code Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09646/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

During maintenance, software developers deal with a number of software change requests. Each of those requests is generally written using natural language texts, and it involves one or more domain related concepts. A developer needs to map those concepts to exact source code locations within the project in order to implement the requested change. This mapping generally starts with a search within the project that requires one or more suitable search terms. Studies suggest that the developers often perform poorly in coming up with good search terms for a change task. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel TextRank-based technique that automatically identifies and suggests search terms for a software change task by analyzing its task description. Experiments with 349 change tasks from two subject systems and comparison with one of the latest and closely related state-of-the-art approaches show that our technique is highly promising in terms of suggestion accuracy, mean average precision and recall.