TI An Information Retrieval Approach for Automatically
Constructing Software Libraries 

LT CUCS-049-90 

OR COLUM 

YR 1990 

AU Yoelle S. Maarek 

AU Daniel M. Berry 

AU Gail E. Kaiser 

AB 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 herhis 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 indexing scheme based on the notions
of lexical affinities 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 fretext indexing scheme, tools
following this  approach can accept free-style natural  language
queries.  This technology has been implemented in the {\sc Guru}
system, which has been applied to construct an organized library
of {\sc Aix} utilities. An experiment was  conducted  in order to
evaluate the retrieval effectiveness of {\sc Guru} as compared to
{\sc InfoExplorer} a hypertext library system for {\sc Aix} 3 on
the IBM RISC System6000 series. We followed the usual evaluation
procedure used in information retrieval, based upon recall and
precision measures, and determined that our system performs 15\

 better on a random test set,  while being much less expensive to
build than {\sc InfoExplorer}.  } }