Building Domain Specific Dictionaries of Verb-Object Relation from Source Code

An identifier is an important key in mapping program elements onto domain knowledge for the purpose of program comprehension. Therefore, if identifiers in a program have inappropriate names, developers can waste a lot of time trying to understand the program. This paper proposes a method for extracting and gathering verb-object (V-O) relations, as good examples of naming, from source code written in an object-oriented programming language. For each of several application domains, dictionaries containing the V-O relations are built and evaluated by software developers. The evaluation results confirm that the relations in the dictionaries are adequate in many cases.