Revolutionizing API Documentation through Summarization
AmirHossein Naghshzan Sylvie Ratte
This study tackles the challenges associated with interpreting Application
Programming Interface (API) documentation, an integral aspect of software
development. Official API documentation, while essential, can be lengthy and
challenging to navigate, prompting developers to seek unofficial sources such
as Stack Overflow. Leveraging the vast user-generated content on Stack
Overflow, including code snippets and discussions, we employ BERTopic and
extractive summarization to automatically generate concise and informative API
summaries. These summaries encompass key insights like general usage, common
developer issues, and potential solutions, sourced from the wealth of knowledge
on Stack Overflow. Software developers evaluate these summaries for
performance, coherence, and interoperability, providing valuable feedback on
the practicality of our approach.