Poster: ALPACA-Advanced Linguistic Pattern and Concept Analysis Framework for Software Engineering Corpora

Software engineering corpora often contain domain-specific concepts and linguistic patterns. Popular text analysis tools are not specially designed to analyze such concepts and patterns. In this paper, we introduce ALPACA, a novel, customizable text analysis framework. The main purpose of ALPACA is to analyze topics and their trends in a text corpus. It allows users to define a topic with a few initial domain-specific keywords and expand it into a much larger set. Every single keyword can be expanded into long clauses to describe topics more precisely. ALPACA extracts those clauses by matching text with linguistic patterns, which are long sequences mixing both specific words and part-of-speech tags frequently appeared in the corpus. ALPACA can detect these patterns directly from pre-processed text We present one example demonstrates the use of ALPACA for text corpora of security reports.