Automatic Extraction of a WordNet-Like Identifier Network from Software

A large part of the time allocated to software maintenance is dedicated to the program comprehension. Many approaches that uses the program structure or the external documentation have been created to assist program comprehension. However, the identifiers of the program are an important source of information that is still not widely used for this purpose. In this article, we propose an approach, based upon Natural Language Processing techniques, that automatically extracts and organizes concepts from software identifiers in a WordNet-like structure that we call lexical views. These lexical views give useful insight on an overall software architecture and can be used to improve results of many software engineering tasks. The proposal is evaluated against a corpus of 24 open source programs.