SBugLocater: Bug Localization Based on Deep Matching and Information Retrieval

Bug localization is a technology that locates buggy source files using bug reports reported by users. Automatic localization of buggy files can speed up the process of bug fixing to improve the efficiency and productivity of software quality assurance teams. Nowadays, some research studies have investigated the natural language information retrieval technology, but few of them have applied the matching technology in deep learning to bug localization. Therefore, we propose a bug localization model SBugLocater based on deep matching and IR. The model composes of three layers: semantic matching layer, relevance matching layer, and IR layer. In particular, the relevance matching layer captures fine-grained local matching signals, while coarse-grained semantic similarity signals come from the semantic matching layer. Further, based on collaborative filtering in different directions, the IR layer works to find whether bug reports and source files are related, which indirectly transforms the matching task of different grammatical structures between bug reports and source files into the same structure and solves the mismatching problem of the first two matching models when the query is short. In our work, four benchmark data sets are used as experimental data sets and Accuracy@k, MAP, and MRR as evaluation metrics, which are used to compare and analyze the performance of bug localization with the four state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that SBugLocater outperforms the four models. For example, compared with the best of the four models, the evaluation metrics of Accuracy@10, MAP, and MRR are improved by 6.9%, 13.9%, and 17%, respectively.