Automatic Mining of Opinions Expressed About APIs in Stack Overflow

Abstract

With the proliferation of online developer forums, developers share their opinions about the APIs they use. The plethora of such information can present challenges to the developers to get quick but informed insights about the APIs. To understand the potential benefits of such API reviews, we conducted a case study of opinions in Stack Overflow using a benchmark dataset of 4522 sentences. We observed that opinions about diverse API aspects (e.g., usability) are prevalent and offer insights that can shape developers perception and decisions related to software development. Motivated by the finding, we built a suite of techniques to automatically mine and categorize opinions about APIs from forum posts. First, we detect opinionated sentences in the forum posts. Second, we associate the opinionated sentences to the API mentions. Third, we detect API aspects (e.g., performance, usability) in the reviews. We developed and deployed a tool called Opiner, supporting the above techniques. Opiner is available online as a search engine, where developers can search for APIs by their names to see all the aggregated opinions about the APIs that are automatically mined and summarized from developer forums.