Recovering traceability links between an API and its learning resources

Large frameworks and libraries require extensive developer learning resources, such as documentation and mailing lists, to be useful. Maintaining these learning resources is challenging partly because they are not explicitly linked to the frameworks' API, and changes in the API are not reflected in the learning resources. Automatically recovering traceability links between an API and learning resources is notoriously difficult due to the inherent ambiguity of unstructured natural language. Code elements mentioned in documents are rarely fully qualified, so readers need to understand the context in which a code element is mentioned. We propose a technique that identifies code-like terms in documents and links these terms to specific code elements in an API, such as methods. In an evaluation study with four open source systems, we found that our technique had an average recall and precision of 96%.