Interdisciplinary Workshop on Statistical Natural Language Processing Methods for Software Engineering

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant funds a workshop to bring together two communities: Software Engineering and Natural Language Processing. Statistical natural language processing (NLP) techniques and tools have become very powerful and are applicable in many domains. Software Engineering researchers have begun to to adopt NLP techniques and tools in the context of Software Engineering to analyze repositories of source code as if they were natural language artifacts. The purpose of this grant is to bring together the Software Engineering and Natural Language communities to address these problems. Many Software Engineering processes and products involve natural language artifacts, such as requirements documents and code comments, and peer reviews, which play a role in program comprehension, code search, traceability and many other purposes in the software development process. The workshop will accelerate the pace of Software Engineering research in these areas and beyond. Natural Language researchers will identify new research directions stimulated by challenges in the Software Engineering domain. Natural Language can be a mode of communication to assist disabled such as people who are visually impaired and or have muscular injuries, thus one of the broader impacts is to advance research that would make programming tasks and jobs more accessible to those populations.