Properly structured software libraries are crucial for the success of software reuse. Specifically, the structure of the software library ought to reflect the functional similarity of the stored software components in order to facilitate the retrieval process. We propose the application of artificial neural network technology to achieve such a structured library. In more detail, we utilize an artificial neural network adhering to the unsupervised learning paradigm. The distinctive feature of this very model is to make the semantic relationship between the stored software components geographically explicit. Thus, the actual user of the software library gets a notion of the semantic relationship between the components in terms of their geographical closeness. 1. Introduction Software reuse is concerned with the technological and organizational background of using already existing software components to build new applications. Software reuse is supposed to increase both the productivity ...

Software reuse has long been touted as an effective means to develop software products. But reuse technologies for software have not lived up to expectations. Among the barriers are high costs of building software repositories and the need for effective tools to help designers locate re-usable software. While many design-forreuse and software classification efforts have been proposed, these methods are cost-intensive and cannot effectively take advantage of large stores of design artifacts that many development organizations have accumulated. Methods are needed that take advantage of these valuable resources in a cost-effective manner. This paper describes an approach to the design of tools to help software designers build repositories of software components and locate potentially re-usable software in those repositories. The approach is investigated with a retrieval tool, named CodeFinder, which supports the process of retrieving software components when information needs are ill-defi...

This is the second year that our group participates in TREC’s Web track. Our experiments focused on the Topic distillation task. Our main goal was to experiment with the Knowledge Agent (KA) technology [1], previously developed at our Lab, for this particular task. The knowledge agent approach was designed to enhance Web search results by utilizing domain knowledge. We first describe the generic KA approach and

An approach for the semi-automated recovery of traceability links between software documentation and source code is presented. The methodology is based on the application of information retrieval techniques to extract and analyze the semantic information from the source code and associated documentation. A semi-automatic process is defined based on the proposed methodology. The paper advocates the use of latent semantic indexing (LSI) as the supporting information retrieval technique. Two case studies using existing software are presented comparing this approach with others. The case studies show positive results for the proposed approach, especially considering the flexibility of the methods used.

In this paper, we describe a progratn of research designed to explore }tow it lexical setnantic theory tnay be exploited for extracting information from corpora suitable for nsc in htformal, ion trieval applications. Unlike with purely statistical collocational anMyscs, the framework of a semantic theory allovs the automatic construction of predictions about semantic relationships among words appearing in coltocational systerns.

. In this work we describe a new approach for morphological disambiguation to enable linguistic indexing for Hebrew search systems. We describe a Hebrew Morphological Disambiguator (HMD or Hemed for short) based on statistical data gathered from large Hebrew corpora. We show how to integrate HMD with a search engine to enable linguistic search for Hebrew. We report some experimental results demonstrating the the superiority of linguistic search over string-matching search, and the contribution of morphological disambiguation to the quality of search result. 1 Background and Motivation With the advent of the Web, more and more textual information is being made available on line, and Information Retrieval (IR) systems are becoming of crucial importance to search through the vast amount of information. Most state-ofthe -art IR systems operate on a canonical representation of documents called a profile that consists of a list (or a vector in the commonly used vector space model [...

This is the third year that our group participates in TREC's Web track, the second year in the topic distillation task. Our experiments last year, as well as those of other participants, indicated that sophisticated link-based measures did not significantly improve search results in comparison to standard text-based relevance scoring. We

Software reuse is the process of building new systems from existing components instead of developing these systems from scratch. For a long time now software reuse is repeatedly acknowledged for playing an essential role in overcoming the so-called software crisis, i.e. the late delivery of then still faulty software products. Current development practice as for example object-oriented analysis, design, and programming should in principle assist the proliferation of the reuse idea. However, before existing components may be considered for reuse they have to be found in a software library. As ever in any area relying on the retrieval of particular objects from a large data store, the process of retrieval may turn out to be rather cumbersome, especially when a large number of objects is contained in the data store and the success of the whole operation is dependent on the retrieval of a small number of relevant objects. With this work we address the assistance of such a retrieval process...

Although software reuse presents clear advantages for programmer productivity and code reliability, it is not practiced enough. One of the reasons for the only moderate success of reuse is the lack of software libraries that facilitate the actual locating and understanding of reusable components. This paper describes a technology for automatically assembling large software libraries that promote software reuse by helping the user locate the components closest to her/his needs. Software libraries are automatically assembled from a set of unorganized components by using information retrieval techniques. The construction of the library is done in two steps. First, attributes are automatically extracted from natural language documentation by using a new free-text indexing scheme based on the notions of lexical a nities and quantity of information. Then, a hierarchy for browsing is automatically generated using a clustering technique that draws only on the information provided by the attributes. Thanks to the free-text indexing scheme, tools following this approach can accept free-style natural language queries. This technology has been implemented in the Guru system, which has been applied to construct an organized library of Aix utilities. An experiment was conducted in order to evaluate the retrieval e ectiveness of Guru as compared to InfoExplorer, ahypertext library system for Aix 3 on the IBM RS/6000 series, as well as to two other indexing schemes. We followed the usual evaluation procedure used in information retrieval, based upon recall and precision measures, and determined that our system retrieved more e ectively than the others. 1

: We give a principled method for allowing users to assign subjective weights to the importance of search terms, that is, the terms forming a query, in information retrieval systems. For example, our method makes it possible for a user to say that she cares twice as much about the first search term as the second search term, and to obtain a ranked list of results that reflects this preference. Our method is based upon a simple formula derived from any existing "unweighted" ranking function. A naive application of the weighted formula would require issuing as many distinct queries as there are search terms, thus damaging the response time of the retrieval. We explain here how to "smoothly" integrate the formula in most retrieval engines, so as not to affect the retrieval performance in terms of response time. Most of this research was done while the author was a Research Fellow at the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory. 1 Introduction and Motivation Users issuing a query (either f...