Developers frequently use APIs to implement certain functionalities, such as parsing Excel Files, reading and writing text files line by line, etc. Developers can greatly benefit from automatic API usage sequence generation based on natural language queries for building applications in a faster and cleaner manner. Existing approaches utilize information retrieval models to search for matching API sequences given a query or use RNN-based encoder-decoder to generate API sequences. As it stands, the first approach treats queries and API names as bags of words. It lacks deep comprehension of the semantics of the queries. The latter approach adapts a neural language model to encode a user query into a fixed-length context vector and generate API sequences from the context vector.

It is not a trivial problem to collect API-relevant examples, usages, and mentions on venues such as Stack Overflow. It requires efforts to correctly recognize whether the discussion refers to the API method that developers/tools are searching for. The content of the Stack Overflow thread, which consists of both text paragraphs describing the involvement of the API method in the discussion and the code snippets containing the API invocation, may refer to the given API method. Leveraging this observation, we develop ARSeek, a context-specific algorithm to capture the semantic and syntactic information of the paragraphs and code snippets in a discussion. ARSeek combines a syntactic word-based score with a score from a predictive model fine-tuned from CodeBERT. In terms of F1-score, ARSeek achieves an average score of 0.8709 and beats the state-of-the-art approach by 14%.

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular venues for developers to find answers to their API-related questions. However, API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow are often ambiguous and thus it could be difficult to find the APIs and learn their usages. Disambiguating these API mentions is not trivial, as an API mention can match with names of APIs from different libraries or even the same one. In this paper, we propose an approach called DATYS to disambiguate API mentions in informal text content of Stack Overflow using type scoping. With type scoping, we consider API methods whose type (i.e. class or interface) appear in more parts (i.e., scopes) of a Stack Overflow thread as more likely to be the API method that the mention refers to. We have evaluated our approach on a dataset of 807 API mentions from 380 threads containing discussions of API methods from four popular third-party Java libraries. Our experiment shows that our approach beats the state-of-the-art by 42.86% in terms of F1-score.