Recommending Analogical APIs via Knowledge Graph Embedding

Mingwei Liu, Yanjun Yang, Yiling Lou, Xin Peng, Zhong Zhou, Xueying Du, Tianyong Yang

Abstract: Library migration, which replaces the current library with a different one to retain the same software behavior, is common in software evolution. An essential part of this is finding an analogous API for the desired functionality. However, due to the multitude of libraries/APIs, manually finding such an API is time-consuming and error-prone. Researchers created automated analogical API recommendation techniques, notably documentation-based methods. Despite potential, these methods have limitations, e.g., incomplete semantic understanding in documentation and scalability issues. In this study, we present KGE4AR, a novel documentation-based approach using knowledge graph (KG) embedding for recommending analogical APIs during library migration. KGE4AR introduces a unified API KG to comprehensively represent documentation knowledge, capturing high-level semantics. It further embeds this unified API KG into vectors for efficient, scalable similarity calculation. We assess KGE4AR with 35,773 Java libraries in two scenarios, with and without target libraries. KGE4AR notably outperforms state-of-the-art techniques (e.g., 47.1%-143.0% and 11.7%-80.6% MRR improvements), showcasing scalability with growing library counts.