Contrastive Learning for API Aspect Analysis
We present a novel approach - CLAA - for API aspect detection in API reviews that utilizes transformer models trained with a supervised contrastive loss objective function. We evaluate CLAA using performance and impact analysis. For performance analysis, we utilized a benchmark dataset on developer discussions collected from Stack Overflow and compare the results to those obtained using state-of-the-art transformer models. Our experiments show that contrastive learning can significantly improve the performance of transformer models in detecting aspects such as Performance, Security, Usability, and Documentation. For impact analysis, we performed empirical and developer study. On a randomly selected and manually labeled 200 online reviews, CLAA achieved 92 while the SOTA baseline achieved 81.5 involving 10 participants, the use of 'Stack Overflow + CLAA' resulted in increased accuracy and confidence during API selection. Replication package: https://github.com/disa-lab/Contrastive-Learning-API-Aspect-ASE2023
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