A Learning Agent That Assists the Browsing of Software Libraries
- Chris Drummond, Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council Canada
- Dan Ionescu, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa
- Robert Holte, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta
Locating software items is difficult, even for knowledgeable software designers, when search ing in large, complex and continuously growing libraries. This paper describes a technique, we term active browsing. An active browser suggests to the designer items it estimates to be close to the target of the search. The novel aspect of active browsing is that it is entirely unobtrusive: it infers its similarity measure from the designer's normal browsing actions, without any special input. Experiments are presented in which the active browsing system succeeds 40% of the time in identifying the target before the designer has found it. An additional experiment indicates that this approach does, indeed, speedup search.
Citation
C. Drummond, D. Ionescu, R. Holte. "A Learning Agent That Assists the Browsing of Software Libraries". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 26(12), pp 1179-1196, January 2000.| Keywords: | software reuse, learning agents, simulated human users, active browsing, machine learning |
| Category: | In Journal |
BibTeX
@article{Drummond+al:00,
author = {Chris Drummond and Dan Ionescu and Robert Holte},
title = {A Learning Agent That Assists the Browsing of Software Libraries},
Volume = "26",
Number = "12",
Pages = {1179-1196},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering},
year = 2000,
}Last Updated: June 04, 2007Submitted by Staurt H. Johnson
