Categorizing npm Packages by Analyzing the Text Information in Software Repositories

To prevent JavaScript developers from reinventing wheels, npm ecosystem provides numerous third-party libraries for developers to realize relevant functionalities. Npm displays the tags provided by the creators for these packages to help developers find suitable ones. However, not all creators have...

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Published in:Proceedings / Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference pp. 53 - 60
Main Authors: Wang, Yu, Liu, Huaxiao, Gao, Shanquan, Li, Shujia
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.12.2021
Subjects:
Codes
Correlation
Ecosystems
JavaScript
Libraries
Multi-label Classification
npm
Software
Tag
Tagging
Wheels
ISSN:2640-0715
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Abstract To prevent JavaScript developers from reinventing wheels, npm ecosystem provides numerous third-party libraries for developers to realize relevant functionalities. Npm displays the tags provided by the creators for these packages to help developers find suitable ones. However, not all creators have the habit of tagging their packages, and thus npm cannot provide tag information of a lot of packages for developers to help them understand the package functionalities effectively. Considering that many tags are unrelated to the functionality of packages, we propose a method to find out the tags that are important to distinguish the functionality categories of packages and assign them to untagged packages for assisting developers in the process of retrieving the packages. Firstly, we analyze the attribute of existing tags in npm to establish category tags (functionality categories). Then, we further mine the readme of tagged packages to generate keywords for each category tag. Finally, our method identifies category tags for untagged packages by measuring the similarity between their readme and the keywords of category tags. The evaluation demonstrates that our approach has a good performance in assigning category tags to untagged packages.
AbstractList To prevent JavaScript developers from reinventing wheels, npm ecosystem provides numerous third-party libraries for developers to realize relevant functionalities. Npm displays the tags provided by the creators for these packages to help developers find suitable ones. However, not all creators have the habit of tagging their packages, and thus npm cannot provide tag information of a lot of packages for developers to help them understand the package functionalities effectively. Considering that many tags are unrelated to the functionality of packages, we propose a method to find out the tags that are important to distinguish the functionality categories of packages and assign them to untagged packages for assisting developers in the process of retrieving the packages. Firstly, we analyze the attribute of existing tags in npm to establish category tags (functionality categories). Then, we further mine the readme of tagged packages to generate keywords for each category tag. Finally, our method identifies category tags for untagged packages by measuring the similarity between their readme and the keywords of category tags. The evaluation demonstrates that our approach has a good performance in assigning category tags to untagged packages.
Author Wang, Yu
Gao, Shanquan
Liu, Huaxiao
Li, Shujia
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  givenname: Huaxiao
  surname: Liu
  fullname: Liu, Huaxiao
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  givenname: Shujia
  surname: Li
  fullname: Li, Shujia
  organization: College of computer science and technology, Jilin University,Changchun,China
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StartPage 53
SubjectTerms Codes
Correlation
Ecosystems
JavaScript
Libraries
Multi-label Classification
npm
Software
Tag
Tagging
Wheels
Title Categorizing npm Packages by Analyzing the Text Information in Software Repositories
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