Lexicon Bad Smells in Software

Abstract

We introduce the notion of "lexicon bad smell", which parallels that of "code smell" and indicates some potential lexicon construction problems that can be addressed through refactoring (e.g., renaming). We created a catalog of lexicon bad smells and we developed a publicly available suite of detectors to locate them. The paper presents a case study in which we used the detectors on two open-source systems. The study revealed the main challenges faced in detecting the lexicon bad smells.