Deep Learning-Based Bug Report Summarization Using Sentence Significance Factors

Abstract

During the maintenance phase of software development, bug reports provide important information for software developers. Developers share information, discuss bugs, and fix associated bugs through bug reports; however, bug reports often include complex and long discussions, and developers have difficulty obtaining the desired information. To address this issue, researchers proposed methods for summarizing bug reports; however, to select relevant sentences, existing methods rely solely on word frequencies or other factors that are dependent on the characteristics of a bug report, failing to produce high-quality summaries or resulting in limited applicability. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning-based bug report summarization method using sentence significance factors. When conducting experiments over a public dataset using believability, sentence-to-sentence cohesion, and topic association as sentence significance factors, the results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method BugSum with respect to precision, recall, and F-score and that the application scope of the proposed method is wider than that of BugSum.

Keywords

• bug report
• bug tracking system
• data-based software engineering
• text summarization
• open source software
• sentence significance factor