Revolutionizing API Documentation through Summarization

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of interpreting lengthy API documentation by leveraging Stack Overflow content to produce concise API insights. It combines BERTopic-based topic modeling with extractive summarization to identify common Android API issues from questions and derive practical solutions from accepted or high-scoring answers. A large-scale dataset of Android-tagged Stack Overflow posts underpins the methodology, and a user study with developers validates the usefulness of the generated summaries. The approach aims to enhance developer productivity by providing targeted, easily consumable API summaries and paves the way for tool integrations such as IDE plugins and recommender systems.

Abstract

This study tackles the challenges associated with interpreting Application Programming Interface (API) documentation, an integral aspect of software development. Official API documentation, while essential, can be lengthy and challenging to navigate, prompting developers to seek unofficial sources such as Stack Overflow. Leveraging the vast user-generated content on Stack Overflow, including code snippets and discussions, we employ BERTopic and extractive summarization to automatically generate concise and informative API summaries. These summaries encompass key insights like general usage, common developer issues, and potential solutions, sourced from the wealth of knowledge on Stack Overflow. Software developers evaluate these summaries for performance, coherence, and interoperability, providing valuable feedback on the practicality of our approach.