Acquiring general understanding of large software systems and components from which they are built can be a time consuming task, but having such an understanding is an important prerequisite to adding features or fixing bugs. In this paper we propose the tool, namely TopicXP, to support developers during such software maintenance tasks by extracting and analyzing unstructured information in source code identifier names and comments using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. TopicXP enables developers to gain an overview of a software system under analysis by extracting and visualizing natural language topics, which generally correspond to concepts or features implemented in software classes. TopicXP is implemented as an open-source Eclipse plug-in, which proposes interactive visualization of topics along with structural dependencies between underlying classes implementing these topics. The paper also presents the results of a preliminary user study aimed at evaluating TopicXP.
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机译：对构建大型软件系统和组件的总体了解可能是一项耗时的任务，但是拥有这种了解是添加功能或修复错误的重要前提。在本文中，我们提出了一种名为Topic XP 的工具，通过使用潜在Dirichlet分配来提取和分析源代码标识符名称和注释中的非结构化信息，以在此类软件维护任务中为开发人员提供支持。主题 XP 使开发人员可以通过提取和可视化自然语言主题来获得所分析软件系统的概述，这些自然语言主题通常与软件类中实现的概念或功能相对应。 Topic XP 作为一个开源Eclipse插件实现，它提出了主题的交互式可视化以及实现这些主题的基础类之间的结构依赖关系。本文还介绍了旨在评估Topic XP 的初步用户研究结果。
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