Inferring semantically related words from software context

Code search is an integral part of software development and program comprehension. The difficulty of code search lies in the inability to guess the exact words used in the code. Therefore, it is crucial for keyword-based code search to expand queries with semantically related words, e.g., synonyms and abbreviations, to increase the search effectiveness. However, it is limited to rely on resources such as English dictionaries and WordNet to obtain semantically related words in software, because many words that are semantically related in software are not semantically related in English. This paper proposes a simple and general technique to automatically infer semantically related words in software by leveraging the context of words in comments and code. We achieve a reasonable accuracy in seven large and popular code bases written in C and Java. Our further evaluation against the state of art shows that our technique can achieve a higher precision and recall.