Text mining for software engineering

Abstract

The mining of textual artifacts is requisite for many important activities in software engineering: tracing of requirements; retrieval of components from a repository; location of manpage text for an area of question, etc. Many such activities leave the "final word" to the analyst --- have the relevant items been retrieved? are there other items that should have been retrieved? When analysts become a part of the text mining process, their decisions on the relevance of retrieved elements impact the final outcome of the activity. In this paper, we undertook a pilot study to examine the impact of analyst decisions on the final outcome of a task.