Identifying Concepts in Software Projects

When working on a project, software developers must be familiar with computing concepts, standards, and technologies related to the project. We present a novel approach, called Scode, to automatically identify those concepts using the project's documentation. Scode combines entity linking and network analysis techniques specialized for the software development domain. In addition to concepts explicitly mentioned in the documentation, Scode can retrieve implicit concepts related to the project's domain. Concepts identified by Scode have a recognized meaning that is consistent across projects. We compared Scode to different baselines and found that it is more effective at mapping projects to a consistent concept space.